


The Very First Stone

by road_rhythm



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-07
Updated: 2020-10-07
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:28:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 82,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26875957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/road_rhythm/pseuds/road_rhythm
Summary: In May of 1993, Sam Winchester disappeared. In June, his family found him.
Relationships: Dean Winchester & John Winchester & Sam Winchester, Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester
Comments: 88
Kudos: 148





	1. Dean

**Author's Note:**

> Big, huge, heaping thanks to [themegalosaurus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/themegalosaurus) and [interstitial](https://archiveofourown.org/users/interstitial) for betaing, and to [dimeliora](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dimeliora) for other invaluable input (much of it at three o'clock in the morning).
> 
> Continuity note: I tend to think of S1-5 as canon and S6 on as progressively optional fanfic. Since no late-season episode was ever going to live up to my expectations for portraying preseries Winchesters, this pays 09x07 and 11x08 no mind.

**_June 4th, 1993_**  
  
  
  
  
  
This was where Dean was going to find his kid brother.

Dad drove past one empty vacation shack, then another. The road had been washed out by spring runoff and wouldn't get fixed until it was time to open back up for ski season, and the car jounced and groaned as Dad eased it over the ruts and potholes. It was a clear day, with nothing higher than the occasional cedar bush to obscure the sky. Above, brilliant blue; below, red clay. Sandwiched between all that color, the dingy trailer they were approaching looked almost cheerful.

Sammy was in that trailer.

No other vehicle was parked there. Dean's first reaction to that was relief: whatever took Sam wasn't here. They could go in, grab him, get him away from here and deal with the monster after he was safe. But the follow-up thought was that that was only if they hadn't missed it. That was if it hadn't already moved on, and taken Sam with it. Or, worse: left Sam behind.

Now Dean's mind was meticulously illustrating what _left behind_ might mean.

His father spoke. "I need you clear on something." Dean straightened as he turned to the driver's seat. "We're going to get your brother and we're going to leave. You are not to discuss the past two weeks with him." Dad held the car steady at exactly the same crawl he'd maintained down this whole road, never faster, never slower. "You do not tell him where you've been. You do not bitch about the motels you stayed in. You do not gab about the license plates you scored or the billboards you thought were funny. You do not fill him in on what he missed. You do not attempt to explain why it took so long to find him after you lost him."

Dean stared unblinking out the windshield and tried to will the water in his eyes back where it came from. "Yessir."

The trailer grew larger. There was nothing stealthy in their approach; it was broad daylight, the trailer had a clear view of the road, the car was loud, and there was no one else out here. Dad must've known for certain that Sam's captor was elsewhere. That, or he had something up his sleeve. John Winchester wouldn't roll up to a monster's front door with no plan whatsoever and Sam's life on the line, that much was certain. Dad knew what he was doing. Whatever they were facing, he'd tell Dean what he needed to know when he needed to know it.

They stopped not ten yards from the front door. Dean was reaching for the passenger door before the car was even in park.

"Stay here."

"But Dad—!"

"Stay here."

He wasn't even looking at Dean. He was staring at that trailer with an impassivity that dried Dean's protests up in his mouth. Then he was out of the car, striding up the walk, ignoring the front door and disappearing around the back.

Months ago, shortly after his fourteenth birthday, Dean had swiped some No-Doz from a Circle K and not bothered to read the packaging. This felt a lot like the aftermath of that. His pulse had been a runaway train more or less since the day Sam had disappeared, and nausea squatted in his throat.

They'd been searching for seventeen and a half days, counting the time it had taken Dad to floor it back to Goodnight, Texas after Dean had called—and Dean had only called once he'd been absolutely sure he had no other choice. Maybe it would be more apt to say that Dad had been searching. He'd been tight-lipped since day one, and since they'd crossed over into New Mexico, all but silent. The only time he spoke to Dean was to tell him to stay in the car and not talk to anyone, or to close the blinds in motel rooms and not budge. There wasn't time for explanations, Dean knew. Dad needed to be focused on finding Sam, not holding Dean's hand. And if Dean had been scared, it had to be nothing compared to what Sam was going through.

Had been going through. Had been going through for two and a half weeks.

It was the pictures that Dean couldn't get to stop. Dad thought in strategies, in moves ahead; Sam—who knew how Sam thought. Probably in sentences and paragraphs. And Dean, well, Dean thought in pictures. It had been a problem and a perk since he'd hit puberty; it was a curse now. Dad hadn't said anything about Sam being dead, so Dean had to believe that he wasn't, but there were only so many reasons to keep a victim alive for this long, and Dean _saw_ them. He saw dark rooms, dirty mattresses, and cages. He saw ligatures on wrists, ropes and duct tape and wire and chain; he saw bruises. He saw stick-like limbs twisted and broken. He saw, in flashes, a face he knew better than his own wearing expressions his brain rejected. He saw blood. He saw it being all his fault.

He needed to piss. He squirmed on the seat and watched the trailer, but whatever was happening inside, he was too far away to hear. A lone vulture circled in the sky overhead.

Dean's knee bounced. His bladder ached. His mind showed him pictures.

They were pretty far out. Well, not that far out, but with the rental place closed for the off-season and this trailer backing right into the Arizona hills, the Pizza Connection a mile back was probably the closest human habitation. You could do anything to a person in a place this isolated. Sammy was ten. Sammy was _ten,_ Jesus—

He was just about to run in there and to hell with orders when the front door of the trailer opened.

One of the things Dean had been picturing was this moment. He'd seen it as Dad bursting out of the trailer with Sam in his arms, devastation on his face, recrimination in his eyes. A pistol in his hand, maybe. Blood spatter or monster guts on his clothes; Sam all helpless and tiny.

This was the wrong picture. John Winchester descended the stairs of the front porch, but Sam was not in his arms. Sam was beside him. Sam was on his own two feet, pulling desperately on Dad's arm, pulling _backwards._ As the door banged shut behind them, a dog of some sort let out a bereft whine.

Sam's face was streaked with tears. His limbs were as skinny as Dean remembered, but clean and whole, and the backpack he'd been wearing the day he disappeared hung on his shoulders. There was no blood. There were no bruises. He tugged against his father's grip over and over, not toward the car but away from it.

Right here in Flagstaff, Arizona, Dean's world turned upside-down.

* * *

The ride out of Flagstaff was surreal. Dad didn't talk. Sam didn't talk; he just sat in the backseat with his tears drying, staring out the window. Dad stopped off at the vacation place's rental office, three miles into town, and took Sam inside with him but still didn't say a word. When they came back out, Sam was crying again, silently this time. While the city fell away, he dashed water and snot from beneath his nose with the back of an unmarred wrist. He had yet to so much as look at Dean. Dean stopped watching him in the side mirror five miles past the city limits.

They didn't stop driving until ten at night, at which point they were in Utah. Dad checked them into a Knight's Inn and they all humped their bags inside just like a million other times in a million other motels. Dean felt like he was watching himself do it.

Inside, Dad poured salt lines, laid down cat's eye shells, and set out nazars. They were the same protections he'd started laying in Tucumcari, the ones that had bound Dean in cold knots of fear, the ones that had made him so certain that a monster was out there. That a monster had Sam. Dad had never said otherwise. He'd never sat Dean down and said, "Your brother ran away. He wasn't taken; he left." Apparently he hadn't realized that he'd needed to. The fact had been so obvious that it had never crossed John Winchester's mind that his eldest son could be stupid enough not to know it already.

When the protections were finished, their father turned to Sam. Sam flinched.

"Sit down."

Sam did, on the edge of the nearest bed. Dean hadn't been told where to be, so he just stood there.

Dad was impassive. "When did you leave?"

"Around noon," Sam said.

"I don't care what time of day. What date?"

"The eighteenth."

"How many days ago is that?"

A second for Sam to count it up. (Sam had to count it up.) "Seventeen."

"Seventeen and a half," Dad said sharply.

Sam didn't say anything.

"How did you travel?"

"I hitchhiked."

"'I hitchhiked, _sir.'"_

"I hitchhiked, sir."

"What have I told you about hitchhiking?"

"Only to do it in emergencies."

"'Only to do it in emergencies, _sir.'"_

"Only to do it in emergencies, sir."

"What was your emergency, Sam?"

Silence.

"Was it an emergency to walk out on this family?"

Silence.

"Was it an emergency to pull me off a job and leave people to die?"

Silence.

"Was it an emergency to abandon your brother?"

"I didn't mean—"

"Did I ask what you meant?"

"No, sir."

"So what was your emergency, Sam?"

Silence again.

"I have to assume your emergency was that you were bored and spoiled and too self-centered to think about anybody else, so you decided to go get your kicks on Route 66. What did you do for money?"

"I saved some up."

Dad stared at him. "So you'd been planning this." Sam didn't answer, but he flushed crimson before turning pale again. "Well, however long you'd been saving money, it can't have been much. So what did you do after it ran out?"

"I stole."

"How much?"

"Not a lot—"

"I'm sorry, I must have something in my ear. It sounded like you just tried to say _not a lot,_ but that can't be right, because that's not an answer to my question. How much? How many green-backed, legal tender, United States dollars?"

"I don't know."

Dad looked at him levelly. "Did you steal from any of the people who gave you rides?"

Aside from the blotches left over from tears, Sam had gone the color of curdled milk. "Sometimes."

"How many people gave you rides?"

That one Sam had an answer for. "Seven."

"How many of them did you steal from?"

"Four."

"That's not sometimes, that's most of the time." When Sam didn't respond, a trace of impatience showed on their father's face. "People don't just give ten-year-olds rides. What did you tell them to get them to take you?"

"Different things."

"What things?"

Sam shifted on the bed. "Whatever I thought would work."

"Well, it worked seven times, so what did you tell the first one?"

"That I'd missed the bus I was on and I needed a ride to meet my grandmother."

"Why?"

The heels of Sam's hands were planted on the coverlet, angling his shoulders in. "Because my mom did drugs and hadn't been home in a few days."

If their father was moved in any particular direction by this, he didn't show it. Dean was having an out-of-body experience. "What else?" Dad asked.

"Different stuff."

_"What else?"_

"I— Last year there was this kid in my class. He had a foster family, and they were hitting him, but he couldn't go anywhere because the CPS lady didn't believe him, so—"

"So you thought that was a pretty good story?"

"Yeah. I mean, no, no sir, I just thought it would—"

"You thought it would serve you. Any more, or did you spin these people the same lie over and over? Didn't any of them question what the hell you were doing in the middle of nowhere by yourself? What did you tell them if they asked?"

"T-that I already ran away but I changed my mind and I was trying to get back to my family."

Gradually, Dean became aware of the sounds around them: a man and a woman arguing in the parking lot outside, something dripping into a bucket in the bathroom, the evening news filtering through the wall. He felt a need to scream ballooning inside him, but he didn't know what to scream, so he stayed silent anyway.

Suddenly Sam jumped to his feet. "I just did what you do! _You_ lie! _You_ steal! _You_ leave!"

If Dean hadn't known better, he'd have called the look on his father's face shock. But Dad just stayed silent again, staring at his youngest until Sam's defiance, finding no reaction to feed it, began to crumble. Sam's fingers unclenched. The red in his face drained back to white. He started to shake. Good.

Just as Dean drew a breath to blurt—he had no idea what, Dad spoke. "Brush your teeth." It was directed at both of them. "Shower. Lights out in fifteen minutes."

He turned around and left.

Now Dean was alone with Sam. Dean didn't want to be in the same _room_ as Sam. He grabbed his kit and went to follow orders, locking the door behind him.

When he came out, Sam did not have his own kit out. He was not following Dad's instructions. He was just standing there staring at the backpack in his hands, and he looked up when Dean came out.

"Dean?"

Dean ignored him to root around in his duffel. None of his clothes were clean; he'd worn all of these at least twice, including the underwear, and they smelled. There hadn't been time to stop at a laundromat while they'd been tearing up the country looking for Sam. He chose the least disgusting options available to him and put them on.

The zipper tags on Sam's backpack jingled softly, but Sam's feet stayed where they were. Dean put his duffel under the table beside the sofa and his Buck knife in easy reach on top of it, lining things up for a prompt exit in the morning.

Finally Sam asked, in a tiny voice: "Are you mad at me?"

Dean stopped. He straightened up and turned.

Sam looked apprehensive. Dean marveled at that. _Apprehensive_ was how people looked when they were worried. _Worried_ was how they felt when they didn't know what was going to happen. "What did you say?"

"Are you mad at me?"

Sam's voice had somehow gotten smaller. That, even more than the question itself, broke the dam on Dean's fury. "I thought you were monster chow," he spat.

Sam's eyes went wide. "But I left a note."

There had not been a note. There had been nothing resembling a note. There'd just been an empty house and the nightmare that had followed, and the sheer cowardice of trying to get out of this by lying took Dean's breath away.

"Yeah, Sam, I'm mad at you. Do you want to know why?" Earlier, Dean had wanted to get in his brother's face, shout at him, shake him, shove him, hit him. Now the six feet separating them was nowhere near enough, and his voice came out matter-of-fact. "Because you're a filthy liar."

The tear-blotches on Sam's face looked like a handprint against his pallor. "I'm not," he said, but his voice wavered.

The denial gave Dean a fresh surge of anger. "I can't believe Dad hasn't slapped you into next week. I can't believe he hasn't belted you till you scream like a baby." Dad would get to it later, no doubt. Dean would never have gotten away with saying the kinds of things Sam just had. He would never have gotten away with telling those kinds of lies about their family. Sam would get what was coming to him. And Dean would watch, and afterward, when Sam wanted Dean to comfort him, Dean would tell him to go to hell where he belonged.

Sam's eyes filled up, his nose going puffy with snot. Dean knew all the signs: waterworks in T-minus five. "Dean," Sam said, and how pathetic he was made Dean want to barf.

"I can't even look at you." Dean grabbed one of the pillows and a blanket from the bed that wasn't Dad's.

Sure enough, Sam was crying now, helpless, mucus-y, hiccuping sobs that shook him where he stood, so lost to it that it was like he didn't even notice. When Dean raked the linens off the bed, he said, "Don't you want the—?"

Without another word, Dean laid down on the couch with his back to his brother and yanked the covers up around himself. He understood now why Dad had ordered strict silence about the time they'd spent searching: he hadn't wanted to give this lying, ungrateful, groveling little traitor the satisfaction.

Sam hiccuped and sniffed and didn't move. Dean switched off the lamp.

* * *

The clock read 5:44 when Dean woke. Dad was still asleep, a rarity. In the next bed, Sam was silent and still, but Dean knew he was awake.

Dean took his kit to the bathroom, peed, and brushed his teeth. When he glanced up in the mirror, he saw a familiar little brass face looking placidly back at him where it lay against his t-shirt.

There was a smell in the bathroom, the thick, rotten one common to the backside of restaurants everywhere. Dean climbed up onto the rim of the tub to reach the narrow window set high in the wall. Through the six inch gap that was all its crank would allow, he looked down on an open dumpster.

He wormed his arms through the narrow angle made by the windowpane and held the necklace over the dumpster. It wasn't quite dawn yet; his target was mostly visible as a square of something slightly darker. The brass horns dug into his palm.

After several seconds, he drew his arm back in, climbed off the tub, and shoved the necklace into his toiletry kit.

When he came out, Dad and Sam were up, the latter loitering awkwardly near the bathroom door with a toothbrush in a plastic baggie. Dean saw his eyes lock on the empty space on his chest, but Sam said nothing, and Dean didn't wait around to see the look on his face.

"Dean." Dad held out a ten dollar bill, still in his boxers. "There's a McDonald's next door. You know what to get."

"Yessir."

"We're leaving in thirty. We're going to Caleb's; he's expecting us this afternoon, so we won't be stopping every five miles for piss breaks. Whatever you need to do before lunch, do it here."

"Yessir."

On the one hand, Caleb lived in rural Wyoming, a ten-hour haul from their current location in the confines of a car. On the other hand, Caleb lived in rural Wyoming, and Dean could almost taste all the space he was going to be able to put between himself and his brother before the next sunset.

Throughout this speech, Dad had been facing Dean but addressing both of them. Now he added, "When we get there, you'll be training with Caleb and doing whatever he needs. I have to get to work. Work I should have been doing for the past two weeks."

Dean controlled himself from flinching. That might sound like a reprimand to Sam, but he knew it was to him, too, for letting Sam run off in the first place. Bad enough when Dean had assumed that Dad thought Dean had let Sam get snatched by some monster. Now that he knew there had been nothing supernatural about it, how much lower must his father's estimation actually be?

A quarter hour later, Dean slid into the shotgun seat and handed his father a large coffee. John Winchester, the man with the iron bladder. Once, under a blanket fort in an attic bedroom in a Michigan November, Dean and Sam had shared a flashlight and made up jokes about it: yellow jarheads, semper peedelis. Dean handed Sam his McDonald's ration without a glance into the backseat. Nobody said anything. As the sun broke the horizon and washed the car's inhabitants, Dad flipped on the radio, and it stayed on for the duration of the trip.

* * *

"You can't give him the silent treatment forever, you know," said Caleb about a week later.

They were carrying and stacking raw, unfinished planks. Not lumber milled down to convenient sizes, but twelve-foot-long, two-foot-wide, four-inch-thick sections of tree with the bark still on. Meanwhile, Sam was in the workshop, out of the sun, pushing a broom that weighed half a pound.

Dean matched his footsteps to Caleb's as the latter backed up to the receiving pallet. "Who?"

They paused to align and drop the plank, then started back toward the trailer that had brought this stuff. "Don't be a wise-ass, Dean."

"I'm not," Dean answered automatically. After a few seconds' silence from Caleb, he tempered it with, "I talk to Sam."

Caleb spared him an assessing glance. Guilt and resentment bubbled up under it in equal measure, but Dean had enough sense to keep his trap shut, unlike some.

Anyway, it was true. Dean talked to Sam. He said things like: "Caleb wants you." And: "We have to carry these down to the creek, that's your half." And: "Dinner's in an hour, finish fast."

It was more conversation than he'd had with his father since they'd arrived. Dad was here, around, but he might as well have been out on a job for all Dean saw of him. Before all this, or at least ever since Sam had found out what the family business really was and there'd been no point tiptoeing around it anymore, Dad would generally spread his research over the walls and tables of whatever living space they were occupying. He'd call Sam over to instruct him on lore and the connections he'd made. He'd call Dean over to make him run the scenarios in his head, ask him what he'd do in this situation or that, explain the grisly death that had claimed him when Dean got it wrong, very occasionally made a considering sound in the back of his throat when Dean said something he hadn't expected.

None of that now. Now their father stayed holed up in Caleb's cellar library all day, and he hadn't even told Dean what he was hunting. When he'd disappeared, Sam hadn't just put Dean through hell; he'd run away on Dean's watch. Dad had yet to say anything about that, but he didn't have to. All he had to do to make clear to everyone that Dean forfeited his father's trust was to stop trusting him.

They schlepped the rest of the planks in silence, which was less out of sullenness on Dean's part than the fact that his arms and shoulders were screaming at him. He managed to lower the last plank onto the pile with only a moderate wobble, or would have had Caleb not reached down and placed it for him like the thing was a popsicle stick. That was the point at which Dean realized Caleb could have moved every single last one of these things alone, faster, and probably without those bowling ball-sized biceps of his feeling like they were going to fall off afterward.

Dean discreetly kicked the base of the pallet when Caleb's back was turned. Fuck carpentry, anyway.

He followed Caleb back into the shop. Their "training" in the past week had mostly consisted of cleaning a bunch of crap up on his property and helping him move lumber around, with occasional breaks for target practice. Now Caleb inspected Sam's sweeping and nodded at the jointer. "Get the shavings out of the chassis," he said, crossing to a table saw and the sheet of plywood leaned against it.

"We're gonna do eight rips off this," he told Dean, cranking up the saw blade while Dean dragged a sawhorse into position. Not that Caleb told him to; he just assumed Dean would. "Sam, when you finish, come help feed."

Sam joined them as Caleb was lining up for the second rip, taking hold of the board opposite Dean. The saw jumped to life again, their signal to start feeding, and together they guided the board down the sawhorse at the pace Caleb set.

The noise made it easy not to talk.

The sheet got narrower with each rip, bringing Sam and Dean closer to each other in twelve-inch increments. As their end of the sheet left their hands toward the end of the fifth rip, Dean turned to gesture for Sam to adjust the horse and stopped short. Sam was staring fixedly at the saw blade, face empty of expression. Something in it rooted Dean to the spot.

Caleb killing the saw at the end of the rip broke the spell. Anger burned in Dean's stomach, and he wanted suddenly to be anywhere but here.

"Can I borrow them for a minute?"

Caleb was the only one who didn't jump at the sound of John Winchester's voice in the workshop. Dad didn't wait for an actual answer.

"There's a job in North Carolina," he said. "We're leaving in the morning. Should be able to make the trip in two and a half days. Pack up before dinner. Dean, a word." He turned and left the workshop.

Dean followed his father's back until John reached a spot about thirty yards distant and turned. Dean braced himself.

"Is Sam your friend?"

The only thing that prevented Dean from vocalizing his knee-jerk reaction to that was being totally thrown by the question. This had to be about giving Sam the cold shoulder. Dean couldn't fathom why, but there was nothing else it could be about, so it had to be about that. Bitterly, he saw where this was going. Family Unity. No dissent in the ranks, no conflict in the unit. That'd be bad for morale. So he swallowed his honesty and said, "Yeah, of course."

"Wrong." Great. "He's your brother. He's ten. You're fourteen. You're about to start high school. You're almost old enough to put a real learner's permit in your wallet. I had to give you your first rubber, for Christ's sake."

 _Had to_ was a little strong a wording, but Dean wasn't about to compound the embarrassment of this moment or that one by mentioning he'd yet to secure an opportunity to use the thing.

"You think I'm being too soft on Sam," said Dad.

"No, sir."

"Don't contradict me. Your brother isn't getting off scot-free for that stunt, but you're the oldest. I expect more of you because of that."

It was the closest Dad had yet come to saying directly: _This was your fault._ Face as stony as he could keep it, Dean gave himself over to humiliation and misery.

"So here is what you're going to do, as the oldest," his father went on. "You're going to grow up. Sam's not your peer. He's not your buddy. Stop trying to be his playmate and start being his role model."

Dean's throat went thick.

"Are you clear on what I'm telling you?"

"Crystal." A ritual answer to a rhetorical question.

"Being the oldest has privileges. The price is responsibility. Are you ready for responsibility, Dean?"

The words stung like a backhand. They weren't fair. Dean had run every obstacle course, hit every target, done everything his father had ever asked ( _except keep your brother safe,_ a voice whispered), and they weren't _fair._

But he could also see them for the other thing that they were, the offer of a path to redemption. "Yes. Please. I'm ready, Dad."

"Fine. You can start by making sure your brother is road-ready by oh-seven hundred. And Dean?"

"Yes, sir?"

"If you really think you're ready to be a man, prove it by remembering the four and a half years between you and Sam. If he annoys the shit out of you, fine. He's ten. He's _going_ to annoy the shit out of you. But you don't have to like him, because you're not his friend, you're his superior."

Dad looked at him levelly. Dean held himself at attention so that his hands wouldn't shake. "Tell me that we are not going to have a repeat of this debacle," his father said.

"We are not going to have a repeat of this debacle," Dean answered.

Dad assessed him a few seconds longer. "All right." He half-turned to go and then stopped. "By the way," he said, "when we get to North Carolina, I've got a job for you."

* * *

Dean drew a bead, steadied his aim, squeezed the trigger, and dealt annihilation.

He lowered his weapon to inspect the effectiveness of the shot. Part of his target had disintegrated, but most of it remained. It was tenacious, the enemy; unkillable.

A jet of water cut across Dean's view from stage left and blasted on the spot he'd just hit. The jet raked up and down the concrete grating for several seconds before the jackhammer sound of the pressure washer cut out again.

"It's pig shit, Winchester, not goddamn towelheads. Quit screwing around."

Obligingly, Dean picked up hosing off the hog parlor floor where his boss, Drew Coleson, had left off, spattering a mist of water and fecal matter over his rubber boots and breathing in the smell through the bandanna over his nose. At least the water drowned out the sound of the hogs penned up outside.

"Load 'er up," Coleson called about an hour later. "It's quittin' time."

Dean and the other six strapping young men who made up the ranks of Coleson's Crew (Professional Pressure-Washing for Home or Farm) started decoupling nozzles from hoses and hoses from splitters. They coiled and hung all the tackle on hooks on the water tank, which sat on a flatbed golf cart.

Mark, the senior among the Crew at seventeen, had the honor of driving the flatbed up a ramp and into the back of the pickup truck Coleson had positioned in front of the barn. The rest of them, Dean, Larry, Charlie, Chuck (not to be confused with Charlie), Terrance, and Bubba, then climbed up into the space left around the flatbed and pulled the tailgate up after them. Charlie tapped the roof of the cab to signal all were aboard, and Coleson pointed them back toward town. It was about half past eleven in the morning and ninety-four degrees Fahrenheit.

The track back to the main road had to be traversed slowly, on account of the ruts in it and the equipment piled in the back of the truck. It also led past the hog lagoon. Dean had lived the first fourteen years of his life blissfully ignorant of the existence of hog lagoons. They were man-made ponds with low earthen walls a few yards distant from the barns, connected to them by several pipes per barn. The floors Dean had spent the last five mornings cleaning were made of concrete grates. When he washed whatever was on them down through those grates, the lagoon was where it drained out.

He'd never seen anything like it. The lagoon was a brilliant, unnatural pink somewhere between dilute blood and Pepto-Bismol. The farm they were working had eight hog barns; the lagoon was bigger than a football field and emitted a smell that Dean, who was a bona fide expert in such matters, could only call evil.

They picked up speed once they got out to the highway, and though the sun was relentless, the wind felt good. Dean rested his arms along the top of the truck bed wall feeling boneless and profoundly unclean. "Guess that's the real price of bacon," he said.

His coworkers did not weigh in. Chuck worked little black logs out from under his fingernails with a penknife, a delicate procedure that took significant skill in the back of a moving pickup truck. Charlie extracted a packet of Big League Chew from his pocket and then a portion of the Chew from its bag with his teeth. Bubba stared at Dean. Bubba often stared at Dean.

"Who came up with 'Coleson's Crew, anyway," Dean asked, "and not 'This Is Ourselves (Under Pressure)'?"

Charlie chewed his Chew. Terrance dragged air and phlegm past his adenoids and hawked the result into the road. Mark sat silently. Larry lounged.

"It was just a thought," said Dean.

Bubba was still staring. He wore jean coveralls over his white t-shirt and had a dark crew cut and a tan. His eyes were brown. His jaw was prominent. "You talk funny," he told Dean.

"Thanks, I've been working on my timing."

"Where're you from?"

"Kansas."

"What's it like there?"

"Oh, you know. Corn on the bottom, sky on the top."

"You ever cleaned barns before?"

"You know, I can't say that I have. It's a problem in Kansas. We have these holes in our education."

Bubba stared back at him. He carried on staring for the remainder of the trip.

Coleson deposited them at the Wam Squam Gas 'n' Go, which was their pickup and dropoff point each day, and rumbled off to park the flatbed in the shed he kept it in half a mile down the road. Most of the boys would catch a ride with their families after church let out (Dean was half surprised that working on Sunday was even legal in this place), but Dean would have about a four-mile walk back to the trailer he currently called home. Dad had dropped him off here at the crack of dawn before driving out somewhere he expected to be until sundown. Same as the last four days.

The Wam Squam sat at the junction of US-701 and NC-53 and served as the western gate to the town of Jewel Lake. The eastern gate, at the junction of 701 and Lakeview Drive, was rival gas mart Dutchman. Southward between them hung the lake itself, as a swollen micropenis between two testicles. Human habitation spotted its length and crusted over its tip.

Jewel Lake was the hottest vacation spot in a fifty-mile radius. Considering the only other things in that radius were pine trees, swamps, and a hundred more hog farms, that wasn't saying a lot. About a third of the lakefront was private land impenetrable with scrub pine and brambles; to either side, another third was either vacation estates or retirement homes for those who couldn't afford the ocean; and the actual town of Jewel Lake occupied the rest.

Some percentage of the inhabitants did live there year-round, many in the Camp Jewel trailer park that must've been a sixth of the town by area and easily half of its houses, but most were vacationing families staying in places like Dean's. Jewel Lake's shore was bright white sand, no trace of mud anywhere. It was a sort of small, inland beach, with amenities to match: putt-putt, go-karts, tourist traps, even a modestly sized amusement park.

And bikinis. Lots of bikinis.

Why couldn't he have gotten a summer job as a life guard?

At the Wam Squam, the Crew sank some of their earnings into 32-oz Slurpees and loitered under the hairline shade afforded by the eaves. As had happened since his first day working this shitty (pun intended) job, a void opened up gradually between Dean and the others.

Down the end of the wall, a group of high school girls did some loitering of their own. They shot occasional glances at the Crew and giggled. All of them were in shorts, and most of them were in tank tops. Dean took back every uncharitable thought he'd ever had about the heat. Heat was good. Heat was beautiful. Heat was man's best friend.

One of the girls, a leggy specimen with long, straight, sandy hair, looked up, caught Dean staring, and said something to her friends, who laughed. One of the latter—dark hair, longer shorts but wearing them well—turned to glance over her shoulder. Her heavily lined eyes locked on his, and a part of Dean that was not his heart but did have lots of blood in it responded. She turned back to her friends and more giggles erupted.

On the other side of the extra-large chest advertising ICE!!!, the Crew was conferring. After a few minutes of this, Mark pushed off the wall and headed toward Dean, the rest of the group following. The girls watched.

"You staying at the lake?" asked Mark. The question was as devoid of inflection as Bubba's eyes were of intelligence.

It appeared that Dean's routine interrogation as a newcomer, deferred for a few days, was finally here. "Yeah."

"How long for?" Still Mark. He seemed to have been appointed spokesman.

"Just passing through," said Dean, and then added, "fellas."

Nothing in Mark's demeanor changed. "Your folks here on vacation?"

It was hot out. Dean was discontented with his life. A general restlessness had been dogging him for days with nowhere to go, and the weight of feminine eyes on his back made him at once defensive and bold. "You go on vacation to wash hog houses?" he asked. "Cookouts, water skiing, hosing pig shit? Well, different strokes, I suppose."

Mark didn't react. None of them reacted. None of them ever did. Dean had met catalytic converters more demonstrative than these guys, and it got on his last nerve. All the Crew said, this time through the mouth of Charlie, was, "You play any football?"

The girls were still watching. "Nah, I'm not big on pussy sports that are bad for your IQ."

That did create a stir—not in the Crew, but in the girls. Whether the murmurs were positive or negative, Dean couldn't tell without turning around to check in a manner extremely uncool, so he didn't.

"My dad played for the Tarheels," said Mark.

"I take it back, then; a bunch of strong, sweaty men in tight pants, what's not to like?"

Just then Terrance's dad's car turned into the parking lot, Chuck's dad's right behind it, and the Crew left the gauntlet Dean had thrown down where it lay as they piled into the vehicles or decamped for the men's room. Elated by the easy victory, Dean was about to check the effect on his female audience members when, led by the sandy-haired babe, the girls filed past him in silence, tossing their empty pop bottles as they went. Dean's elation soured as quickly as it had soared.

Dean resigned himself to the fact that he might as well start walking. At least for the time it took him to get back to the trailer, he'd have the peace of being alone, if hot. He upended the warm remains of his Slurpee and looked up to see the girl with the eyeliner looking right at him.

She came over. Language fell out of Dean's brain like pocket change out of his last pair of jeans.

"Better be careful," she said. It sounded less like a warning than a challenge. "Football's the third-most popular religion around here."

Her shorts were definitely longer than those of the first or indeed second girl on whom Dean's eye had fallen, but they were rolled up far enough to put some daylight between hem and knee. Her collared shirt had the top two buttons undone, and had been knotted at the tails to show a sliver of belly. She wore a black choker, and behind that eyeliner, she assessed him in a way that was almost certainly probably kind of sexy.

"What's the second?" asked Dean. No one needed to ask the first.

"NASCAR. But I like NASCAR," she added.

"Me, too." It was true in the moment.

She brushed her hair back. In harsh opposition to Dean, it smelled good. "So you're working for old man Coleson now."

"Yeah, well. The pay is good," he lied.

"I haven't seen you before. How long you been here?"

"We got here Wednesday."

"If you're brand-new in town, how come you got a job with Coleson so fast?"

Not knowing how else to answer, Dean admitted, "My dad got it for me." Christ, that sounded lame. "A friend of his knows a guy here." Arguably lamer still. The same guy owned the rental place they were staying in, but he'd made it clear that the favor being done was to whoever he and John Winchester had in common, not to John himself and certainly not to his sons.

She wrinkled her nose. "How come your dad wanted to come _here?"_

"It's just for work. We'll probably be out of here by the end of the month." Then he realized how that sounded. "Er—what about you?"

"How long have I been here or how long until I get out?"

"Either?"

"Well, I've been here all my life, so fifteen years now. And it's looking like I'll die here, too, so add another fifteen, I guess." She flipped her hair over her shoulder; stray ends dangled down the open neck of her shirt. "How old are you?"

"Fifteen," Dean said quickly.

A thin, impatient shout reached across the street: "Come _on!"_ One of the girls waved from the direction of the barbecue shack nearby, the rest of the pack even more distant.

"I better go." The girl smiled at Dean. She was wearing lip gloss; he hadn't noticed that before. "See you around."

* * *

Dean had made it halfway back to home base before realizing he had never in fact gotten the girl's name. His anguished expletive had put birds to flight.

 _See you around._ The memory mocked him. All Dean was seeing these days was pigs' asses and what came out of them.

Well, that was still better than seeing Sam. For obvious reasons, Sam was grounded. At Caleb's, Dean had received this news with no small amount of schadenfreude, but once they'd reached Jewel Lake, the downsides had quickly become apparent. One of these was the single-wide trailer they were staying in. Another was that Sam being grounded functionally meant that _Dean_ was grounded, because he was stuck playing prison warden.

The closest to freedom he got was PT for an hour every night. Whenever Dad wasn't working this job off in parts unknown, he was locked in the master bedroom researching, so PT was the only time Dean saw his father, too. The only company to be had was the Crew in the mornings, who didn't count, and Sam in the afternoon, who really didn't count.

On Tuesday night, Dean was in the living room—because Sam was in their bedroom, and it was a priority for Dean these days to be wherever Sam wasn't—when Sam came in. He looked around, saw only Dean, and hesitated. In the dark windowpane above the TV, Dean could see him hovering. It was unbelievably irritating.

"Where's Dad?" Sam nutted up enough to ask finally.

Without turning around from the TV, Dean said, "Is he in our room?"

"What? No."

"Is he in here?"

"No—"

"Then by process of elimination…" Dean drawled.

He went back to watching TV. Eventually Sam's feet moved on the carpet behind him and then there was a knock on the master bedroom door.

After a few seconds, it opened. "Sam. What is it?"

Dean watched Sam pluck up his courage in the window. "Can I go to the youth group tomorrow?"

"Can you go to the what?"

"The youth group. This kid came by and told me about it. It's at the church tomorrow at one; it's about… leadership stuff."

Dean snorted inaudibly.

"It's in a church?" Dad asked.

"Yeah."

Dean expected to hear a variation on the theme of, "Absolutely not, because you are grounded until the sun swells up and dies," but instead Dad said, "Fine. But Dean has to go with you."

"It's only for eight- to twelve-year-olds," Sam said before Dean could object himself.

"To drop you off and pick you up, I meant. Dean, you will verify there is an adult on the premises before you let him out of your sight."

So Dean would get to waste a chunk of his life escorting Sam. Sam, who had cheerfully abandoned both of them not even a month before. Sam, who was apparently allowed to go to youth groups. Dean got to wash pig shit; Sam got to go to youth groups.

Dean had to hoof it back from the Wam Squam Wednesday afternoon to make it in time, too, and wasn't that fun in an eastern North Carolina summer. The walk home along NC-53 took him first past the dense thicket that darkened the northern end of the lake, then past about half a mile of retirees' homes and vacation condos, then finally, as he turned onto Lakefront at the _Welcome to Jewel Lake_ sign, past the seemingly endless sprawl of Camp Jewel, hidden behind its tall, white plastic fence save for the occasional American or Confederate flag hoisted high here or there.

On the one hand, this was the hottest part of the walk. On the other hand, the Putt-Putt lay on the other side of the street, which at least gave him something to look at. A menagerie of brightly painted fiberglass statues populated the spaces between holes, each more psychedelic than the next. The place looked like a counterfeit Beatles movie brought to life. Any self-respecting mini-golf offered something campy in the way of décor, but these stood apart by virtue of sheer artistic incompetence. Their maker had had a lot of enthusiasm but a limited grasp of proportion, and most of the figures had a disconcertingly stretched appearance.

Over it all, on a plinth beside the ticket booth, presided a samurai warrior. What thematic connection this had with the rest of the place, Dean was unsure, but it was distinctive. It wore a yellow tunic over a blue skirt accented by red armor and stout, curl-toed boots, topped off with one of those mullet-style samurai helmets. Its eyes were what Dean found mesmerizing. Above chipmunk cheeks and below heavy black brows with a not-so-faintly racist cant, these were about the size and shape of golfballs. For reasons known only to the artist, the whites were painted exactly the same pasty beige as the rest of the face; then small, pale blue disks went in the middle of those; then two black pinpricks for pupils. A frowning, red slash of mouth communicated the samurai's utter contempt toward the picnic table on which he was eternally laser-focused.

PUTT-PUTT, read the sign beside the course. Putt-Putt was the only name it had. Not "Jewel Lake Putt-Putt." Not "Mini-Golf Madness" or anything more creative. Just PUTT-PUTT.

After the Putt-Putt came the other essential amenities: pizza, video rental, fast food, ice cream, laundromat. Back on the lakefront side of the street, opposite the coin laundry, Camp Jewel terminated in a big, open field of scraggly grass over white sand that afforded a clear view of the lake. Right by the shore stood an open air chapel of some kind. And on the eastern border of the field, facing west toward Camp Jewel, sat the single-wide trailer they currently called home.

Dean stopped at the front door to shuck every piece of clothing he legally could into a Hefty bag left by the wooden stairs for the purpose. When it was full, it'd go on Sam's chores list and get hauled straight to the laundromat. For now, Dean had just enough time to shower the barn stench off before escorting Sam to this youth group thing.

As they left the trailer and followed the tire tracks in the sand out to the street, Sam asked, "Where's Dad?"

"I hate it when you do that," said Dean.

"Do what?"

"Talk."

Sam shut up and diverted his energies into kicking the heels of his shoes into the sidewalk, peering down side streets they passed, walking too slowly, and generally finding a million other ways to be annoying. Dean gritted his teeth.

"I assume you know which church we're going to?"

"The big one. We run past it at night. It's right across from Goldston's."

Dean had to wonder where Sam was getting his information, since he was grounded, and all. "How did you even find out about this thing?"

"A kid came by on his bike."

Dean snorted.

"What?"

"Just happened to bike up and invite you to a _youth group."_

"Yes."

Whatever. If Dad didn't care that Sam was sneaking out in the mornings, it wasn't like there was anything Dean could do about it.

The church Dean didn't recall (they all blended together after the first dozen or so), but Goldston's was an easy landmark. It was the beating, beeping, multicolor-lighted heart of the town, and the single biggest lakefront property by area or linear feet of shoreline. Despite jogging past it every night, Dean had yet to set foot inside it, but he could read the lay of the land with the experienced eye of a nomad huntsman surveying a virgin expanse of steppe. Behind its chain-link fence sprawled a complex of funfair, arcade, buffet restaurants, gift shops, boardwalk, and the largest pier on the water.

Once they drew level with it, he could sort of remember the church, too. It was set pretty far back from the road and he hadn't been down this way in daylight before, so this was his first clear view of the building. It looked like a lot of churches around here: low, long, clad in brick. Bigger and nicer than the white cinder block one they'd passed on the way here, but nothing special.

One thing that did set it apart, though, was a collection of sculptures on the lawn. A mixed audience of barnyard animals and pop-eyed children craned their necks to gaze up at a pink-skinned Jesus. Flamingo pink. All of the statues were brightly colored and, though Dean hadn't even seen them before in the dark, vaguely familiar.

In front of Jesus and His flock stood a movable-type church sign:

_JEWEL OF CHRIST MINISTRIES_  
_SUN 9 AM WORSHIP_  
_A 4-IN TONGUE CAN BRING A 6-FT MAN 2 HIS KNEES_

Dean brayed like a donkey.

Sam looked at him suspiciously. "What?"

Dean smirked as he ambled up to the front doors. "Nothin'. We go through the front, around the side, what?"

Sam, who'd been reaching for the knob, seized up with a deer-in-the-headlights look. "I dunno."

Before Dean could tell him to chill out already, the door opened from the inside. The man coming through it stopped at the sight of them. He was about Dad's age, though slimmer, with dark hair cropped close and wearing that style of button-down that screamed _pastor_ anywhere in America. "Can I help you boys?"

"I'm here for the… youth group?" Sam asked timidly, like he was on a personal mission to embarrass the Winchester name.

The man beamed. "Why, hello! You must be Sam. Tyler told me about you, we're glad you're here." He had that creepy-ass southern accent everyone around here did. "Come in come in. And you are?"

"Not staying," said Dean. "Somebody over eighteen runs this show, right?"

"That'd be me," said the pastor.

"Awesome. Be ready to split at two-thirty," he told Sam. "See you, padre."

Dean left behind the church, and Sam's stuttering, as promptly as he could without actually running.

Halfway down the driveway, he saw her: a girl in her mid-teens with dark hair and a knee-length jean skirt, lounging against the Goldston's fence. He was barely aware of his feet crossing the distance.

It was Eyeliner Girl. She had dark lipstick this time, and she smirked at him as he approached.

"You some kind of Jesus freak?" she asked.

Her southern accent was not like the pastor's southern accent. Hers was very exotic, not creepy at all.

The unfairness of being seen dropping his kid brother off at _church_ by the one girl who had talked to him in all of Beulah County lit a fire in Dean's blood. "If I'm a freak," he said, "it ain't for Jesus."

Her smirk eased into a smile. "I'm Kristina." She held out her hand.

"Dean." She shook with surprising formality. "What about you?" Dean asked. "You a churchgoer?"

She made a face. "Not if I can help it."

"Yeah, it's not usually my scene," he said. "I just had to drop my kid brother off."

"You mean the sight of Jewel Lake's finest church doesn't just make you wanna sing to the angels?"

Dean evaluated the building over his shoulder. "Makes me want to call a better contractor, maybe."

Kristina indicated the preaching Jesus diorama on the lawn with her chin. "Those statues remind you of anything?"

 _"Yeah,_ actually, and it's bugging me."

"You know the Putt-Putt?"

Dean's jaw dropped. The colors, the fiberglass construction, the Gumby school of anatomy: there could be no doubt. "You're kidding."

"Same guy," said Kristina placidly. "Did all those ones for the mini-golf and then donated these ones to the church."

"Wow. That's… wow."

She laughed. It was musical. Not Led Zeppelin, maybe, but at least Twisted Sister and maybe even Alice Cooper.

Rarely had Dean made a girl laugh before. Girls in general he made laugh all the time; at the last school's mandatory sex ed Safe Space Q&A, he'd submitted the only question in the class, swaggering up between the silent desks to pop it in the box, and when the spreading asthmatic woman sent to teach them the sacred mysteries had looked up from reading his paper like a walleye on a slab and said, "I have never heard of brown semen before, but I imagine it would not be a good thing," the girls in the class had howled as hard as the boys. Harder, possibly. Things like that. Not many of them had translated to wanting to talk to him afterward. Not one-on-one, not while wearing lipstick and a choker and a shirt knotted up at the bottom.

Possibly it was the novelty that made Dean press his advantage and say, "Can I have your number?"

For a split second, Kristina seemed startled. But then a plum-colored smile bloomed.

* * *

Too fucking bad he had no opportunity to do anything with the information.

Every morning, Dad dropped him at the Wam Squam at oh-six-thirty and turned left onto 701-S without breathing a word of what the job was about. Every afternoon, Dean checked that Sam had completed the chores list left for him and watched grainy television on the sagging couch and did not think about how a month ago, he'd had a purpose higher than washing hog parlors. Every evening, he ran PT with Sam in front of him and Dad in front of Sam and didn't remember that he used to be training _for_ something. Every night, he closed his eyes on a yard-wide mattress bolted to the wall and pretended not to hear Sam awake in the next bed.

Coleson was paying them all cash. He wasn't paying them nearly enough, in Dean's opinion, but with nowhere to go, the earnings piled up almost offensively.

On Thursday, Dad got home around eight, ate dinner with them (grilled cheese for the third night running; Sam's repertoire was limited), disappeared into his room for an hour, and emerged wearing PT clothes to tell them they'd be training that night.

PT didn't count as training. PT was just PT. It was mind-numbing. Training at least stood a chance of being interesting. Predictably, Sam looked as peevish about it as Dean was relieved. After months begging Dad to let him do more of it, Sam always looked that way when it was time for training these days.

They started off with a warm-up jog, passing the post office and then Goldston's without Dad calling for an increase in pace. There was a snowball's chance this meant Dad was giving them an easy night; it was a lot more likely they were going to need their strength. Dean got his first hint of apprehension. Working up a sweat had sounded a lot more appealing when they'd still been in the A/C. Instinctively, he glanced toward his brother before he could stop himself, and saw Sam half turn, like he'd started to do the same. Then they both faced forward.

Just past Goldston's on the other side of the street, neighboring Sam's church, was a small trailer camp with bungalows mixed in. Past that was a sign reading _GO-KART - ATV._ Dad turned in at the sign.

"Uh, Dad?" said Sam.

 _Keep your voice down,_ Dean thought.

"Keep your voice down," said their father.

A gravel drive led past a rental office and a thick screen of trees to a small ATV course. Tidewater North Carolina was flat as a board, but the course had man-made hills of sand and clay packed over scaffolds of timber and tractor tires, and one big log bridge. The latter was clearly the pride of the place. It was shaped like a distended letter A, steep on either side with a sharp hinge at the top. The ATV track passed over and looped beneath it.

Most importantly for Winchester purposes, the course was hemmed in on all sides by a line of trees and thick hedgerow. So long as they were quiet and didn't use lights, they could probably be here for hours undetected. Smart. Dad always knew how to get creative with their surroundings.

Dad stopped at the foot of the ATV track and turned to them. Dean wondered what they'd be doing tonight. Sparring? Wrestling? They hadn't brought any weapons, so it had to be something like that.

"You're hunting something," Dad told them. "Your brother's injured, maybe unconscious. He can't walk out on his own; you can't leave him where he is. How are you going to move him?"

Oh, no. Oh, hell no.

Sam slowly put his hand up. "Build a stretcher, sir?"

"No."

Sam knew the actual answer as well as Dean did; he was probably just hoping against hope to wriggle out of it. Well, the feeling was mutual.

Dad waited a beat longer and then, when neither of them volunteered anything else, sighed. "Fireman carries. Both of you. Dean, you're first lifter. Sam, starfish."

Sam turned and faced Dean. Dean turned and faced Sam. For about five seconds, as they looked at each other, they were united and equal in misery.

Except this was Sam's fault. Dean thought of everything he could be doing in a town like this if Dad didn't have them both on lockdown and wrinkled up his nose, as if at a week's worth of pig shit. Sam curled his lip, wordlessly declaring he'd sooner cuddle an armadillo three days dead.

But there was no fighting the inevitable. Sam stood with his feet wide apart and his arms stretched out to the side.

"It's been a while, so Dean, what's first?"

"Grab his wrist." Reluctantly, Dean reached out to circle Sam's left wrist with his right hand. His fingers wrapped around with an inch of space to spare.

"Then?"

"Arm between his legs." Dean started to bend over.

"Squat, don't bend!" Dad snapped. "You've forgotten this already? You want a hernia before you're twenty?"

Dean froze. "No, sir," he muttered without looking at anybody. He squatted with his back straight this time, threading his left arm between Sam's legs to loosely clasp the back of his knee. It fit in his palm.

Dad made a few manual corrections to Dean's form, straightening some invisible kink out of his spine. "All right," he said finally. "Next?"

Sam wouldn't stop fucking fidgeting. "Against his hip," Dean told Sam's shoes, and planted his shoulder into his brother's groin warningly. Sam drew in a sharp breath, but he stopped squirming.

"Sam?" Dad's voice was not patient.

"Hand on his butt," Sam supplied in dejection. He braced his right hand on the top of Dean's tailbone and shuddered, like he was the one currently smelling sweaty basketball shorts.

"All right," Dad said again. He walked around them, checking their position, inspecting Dean's grip and Sam's before finally grunting approval and stepping back. "Fine. Three, two, one—lift."

Dean pulled Sam's knee and wrist in toward the center line of his body at the same time that he pushed up from his knees. Sam used the hand planted on the lowermost slope of his back to help pivot himself over Dean's shoulders. Dean ended up standing with his left arm wound over and under Sam's right upper leg to hold his wrist, and Sam's nose bumping into the back of his triceps.

Dad gave them another three-sixty. "Does he feel secure?" he asked Dean.

"Yeah."

"Sam, you feel secure?"

"Yeah."

"Fine. Let's find out if either of you is lying." Dad took ten deliberate steps backward. "Dean, come to me, nice and slow."

This part of the track was pretty flat, though pitted in places with tire ruts. Dean planted each step carefully.

Dean's ear was more or less in Sam's armpit. "You reek," he muttered under his breath.

 _"You_ reek," Sam hissed back.

Dean snorted. He shifted his grip and accidentally pinched Sam's wrist. Sam decided it had been on purpose and dug the corner of a thumbnail into Dean's tailbone in retaliation. They made it over the distance without either of them falling on their ass, however.

"Fine, let him down," Dad said. "Under control, Dean, under control!" When all three of them had earth under their shoes again, he added, "Sam, now you."

The first time the three of them had done this had been about a year and a half ago. Ever since he'd found out about hunting back at Christmas, Sam had been pestering Dad non-stop to take him on all the hunts and exercises he took Dean on. Having three instead of two opened up possibilities, and there was no sense pretending they were normal anymore, so their father did start including him more.

So far Sam had been Dean's only partner for this. Dean saw fireman carry demonstrations before he was allowed to try it himself, but he never could have lifted Dad. That hadn't ever been on the table. Sam had fallen on his face the first time he'd tried to lift Dean, of course, but they'd kept at it—there'd been four or five of these drills before today—and Sam had managed it eventually. Dad had even added five steps of carrying to their routine last time, and it had been fine. Clearly not easy for him, but it hadn't been easy for Dean either, and they'd both survived. No one had gotten dropped on his ass, anyway.

Dean assumed the starfish position, and Dad made Sam narrate each step as he had Dean. Dean hissed when Sam rammed his shoulder into his groin a lot harder than necessary. Bony little fucker. Completely unprovoked, too.

After a lot of circling, poking, and hands-on correction, Dad said, "All right. One, two, three, lift."

Sam pushed up from his knees, Dean pushed off of the ground, the world swooped over and around and then Dean was in the air.

Getting lifted was a lot more nerve-wracking than lifting, Dean found. There was no moment when Sam felt smaller than when his shoulder was in Dean's stomach and Dean was staring down at his scuffed knees and splitting Converse from this angle. It felt wrong. Well, whatever. It was about time Sam got the hard end of something.

Another inspection, a few more corrections. "When you're ready," Dad said.

Sam was out of condition. He inched across the ground at a snail's pace, and Dean could feel him getting weaker—and himself closer to a header into the ground—with every second that drained away.

Sam's knee wobbled dangerously as he stepped across a pothole. "Don't _drop_ me."

"Shut up, fatso." Sam took another precarious step.

"Like _I'm_ the one who's been sitting on my ass for the better part of a month. You're out of shape."

"Oh?" Sam pitched his voice low, matching Dean's. "Didn't know hosing barns was part of Navy SEAL training."

Dean gave Sam a wedgie. Sam, under the guise of redistributing Dean's weight, jounced him so he bit his tongue. Dean kicked Sam in the thigh. Sam dumped him like a sack.

Dean sprawled on his ass. Sam stood over him. In the few seconds' grace period before their father descended on them, they glared at each other. There was venom in Sam's eyes like Dean had never seen before. It was open and undisguised and very close to hate, and Dean felt it with the satisfaction of a connecting fist.

With his pants seat in a puddle, Dean spat out, "You hate this so much, what the hell were you always riding us to let you play for? Huh? You weren't even supposed to _know._ That journal's like the most private thing he has, he never goes anywhere without it, and you stole it like a fucking sneak. Now you wanna cry about it. So drop me, then. Not like you weren't waiting for a chance to all along."

For an instant, the shock on Sam's face almost made this all worth it.

Then Dad was there, looming over both of them. He looked between Sam and Dean. "Get up," he told Dean.

Dean picked himself up.

Dad turned to Sam. "Do you think this is a game?"

Sam stared at his father. He stared like he'd forgotten Dean even existed, and a tendril of uncertainty worked its way into Dean's righteous satisfaction. "Do you?" Sam asked, almost wonderingly.

Dad looked as bewildered at that as Dean felt. His fury remained intact, though. "Why did you drop your brother, Sam?"

Sam just looked at him a moment longer. "He's heavier than I am," he said. "You're making both of us do it like it's the same thing, and it's not. It isn't fair."

"So what?"

Sam blinked. Dean blinked.

Dad stepped in, toe to toe with Sam and two heads taller. "Who said it was going to be fair? Of course it isn't fair. Life isn't fair. Life or death sure as hell isn't. Sometimes you'll have to pull more than your piddling weight. That's not just our family, _Sammy,_ that's families. No one gives a shit how unfair it is. That's not just monsters, that's people. You think I'm going to let you get away with being unprepared just so you can have some fairness? Not my sons. Both of you, come with me."

In spite of themselves, Sam and Dean traded a glance.

"Now!"

They followed.

The bridge wasn't all that large. Nothing in here was. Its entire surface length was probably thirty yards at the most, but it was steep. Each leg of the A was pitched at a good forty percent grade, and Dean swallowed when they stopped at the base of it.

"Sam, starfish."

Sam looked their father in the eye and did it.

Dad didn't make them do the verbal run-through this time. He didn't even have to tell them what the task was. Dean lifted Sam, and Dad walked backwards up the bridge, stopped at the top, and counted down from five.

Dean grunted on the first step of the ascent. After three or four, his hamstrings were burning. Sam kept his weight centered and his mouth shut and didn't try anything.

Dean's stomach was acid. There was something in the air suddenly, something between his father and brother, and he hated and resented it. He resented the fact that it had ridden in at the moment he was finally getting a chance at some payback and swept all Dean's outrage aside like it didn't even matter. Like he was just a backdrop for their drama to play out against. He resented the fact that he didn't understand it, and he resented how afraid he was of not understanding.

—six, seven, eight steps. Dean stopped and, very carefully, readjusted Sam's weight. For a moment, it just felt like moving more of himself, like his whole shape had changed. His father's gaze bore down on them from above, but Dean couldn't tell whether he was looking at him or at Sam.

Nine. Ten. Eleven, twelve, thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen.

At last Dean was standing on the apex of the bridge, next to Dad. He bent to let Sam slither to the ground, remembering just in time to use his sweat-greased hold on Sam's knee to marginally control his descent. He barely even saw their father spotting them. Dean dashed sweat from his eyes with the back of his hand, blinking.

"Come on, boys."

They followed him back down the bridge, Dean stumbling on legs gone rubbery. At the bottom, Dad stood back and waited.

Dean looked between the bridge and Sam, and between Sam and their father. "Dad—"

"Starfish, Dean."

Arguing on Sam's behalf was the last thing Dean wanted to do, but it broke out of him nevertheless. "Dad, he's too small. Maybe he should do it with something else, a tire or something."

"Did I stutter?"

When Sam hoisted him this time, Dean helped as much as he could. Sam gave no indication that he'd noticed.

"Suck in that gut, Sam." Dad walked backward up the bridge.

The incline changed everything about the balance of the lifter, and Dean drew in a breath when he felt Sam discover it. The second step was less lopsided, but a lot slower.

From this vantage point, all Dean could really see was Sam's t-shirt where his face was smashed into it and the sand-caked logs of the track immediately below. The latter moved slowly as Sam pushed through another step, this time with a dangerous wobble at the end.

"Sam—" he started to say.

Sam ignored him.

Sweat burned Dean's eyes as it ran down his face, but he didn't dare move to try to stop it. He couldn't seem to shut his eyes, either, and he watched Sam plant his feet on the track step after step. Four. Five. Six.

They went down without any warning. Dean's chest landed across Sam's back, but his head got a sloppy kiss from one of the logs and he cursed a blue streak. Sam's mouth opened, but all that came out was the sucking wheeze of someone freshly winded. The sound operated directly on Dean's autonomic nervous system.

Dad was running down the hill. Dean yanked Sam up, pushed his back forward and his head down, and the sound shifted as Sam was suddenly dragging air in. He coughed. Dean's pulse was racing.

"That'll do for tonight," Dad said. He sounded almost unnerved. "Dean, let's—"

"Starfish," Sam told Dean.

Dean blinked. "Don't be an idiot."

Sam moved faster than he expected. He grabbed Dean's wrist, shoved his shoulder into Dean's stomach, and yanked him down and over his shoulders.

He couldn't have managed it if Dean hadn't helped him on pure instinct. As it was, he still nearly didn't make it upright; he started to buckle, and Dean started to panic, before Sam sucked in his gut like he was hearing Dad say it and pushed, hard, from his knees. And then Dean was in the air.

The world turned in a slow, teetering arc as Sam turned to face the bridge. The bones of his shoulder were distinct in the softness above Dean's groin. After a long moment, Dad's shoes crunched in the sand and he walked back up to the top. There he stopped, waiting.

Sam took one step up the incline, then another one.

The moon shed thin, even light that defined the world in colorless outlines. In the semi-dark, the smells of Dean's own body and his brother's were potent, the sounds of their combined breathing loud. Dean couldn't see Dad without lifting his head, which he didn't dare do. Sam's legs wobbled on each push off of the ground. Two. Three.

"This is stupid," Dean said, voice low and taut. "Put me down so we can all go home."

Four. Five. Six.

Midway through the next step something went wrong with Sam's footing. He caught himself, but it cost him, and from where he had his arm braced to help center his own weight Dean _felt_ Sam's back spasm.

"Just drop me already." Dean spat the words through Sam's t-shirt, damp on damp, not for their father's ears. "You didn't have any problem doing it before."

Sam kept ignoring him. Seven.

"Put me down, Sam." Dean was unnerved now. "Stop."

Eight. Nine.

Between steps ten and eleven, Sam's left knee gave out.

Dean was ready for it this time; he rolled an instant before they hit the ground, so he was able to spare Sam the additional impact. He looked up to see Sam flat on his face, panting.

"That's enough for now." Dad's voice brooked no argument. "Keep it down on the way out."

It was a long time before Sam moved. He wiped mud from his cheek with a shaking hand. Dean turned away, mute with helpless fear and more helpless anger. He had no idea what had just happened here. No one seemed inclined to clue him in.

What else was new.

* * *

Saturday morning dawned more oppressive than usual. Sam was going to the frigging Bible study again today, which meant Dean was, too; one of Sam's new little friends' moms was escorting him there, but Dean still had to retrieve him after. Sam hadn't said what they actually did there. Not that Dean had asked. When they were both at home, Dean hung out in the living room, and Sam stuck to the bedroom like JIF in the bottom of the jar. Dean let him. Like ignoring Dean at home told him anything that hitchhiking halfway across the country hadn't.

The silver lining to hosing hog parlors from 7:00 a.m. to noon was that at least he couldn't hear anything over the pressure washer. There needed to be a silver lining of some kind, too, because the Crew was pissing him off.

Dean couldn't have said why. With a gun to his head, he might have admitted that these guys hadn't actually done anything to him, but every time he caught Bubba or Charlie or, increasingly, Mark staring at him with that impenetrable blankness, all Dean could think was, _The hell are you looking at. Bet your brother would ditch you, too, if he only had the brains._

At 10:00, they took their fifteen-minute break sitting against the shady side of the barn while they waited their turn in the farm's singular Port-a-John. Dean was sore as hell from last night. He toyed with the idea of just letting free from the bank of the hog lagoon, but the stench was as persuasive as a baseball bat. No one went within ten yards of the place.

It was particularly bad today because there was no breeze. The sun shone, but the air was too still. The Impala's radio had played the 6:30 a.m. weather forecast every morning for the last week running, but even if it hadn't, Dean would have known something heavy was on the way. Even the cicadas seemed to know it.

Mark returned from conferring with Coleson and informed them, "Big storms due through tomorrow. Mr. Coleson says take the day off, we'll come back Monday."

The farm they were working had ten barns, and they were currently on the sixth. Heads nodded up and down the wall.

A day of pouring rain in a trailer that was small even before you put Sam in it. Fantastic. Figured that Dean finally got a day off, and the prospect was one that made blasting pig shit off concrete sound good.

"What you gonna do with your day, Mark?"

"Got church," said Mark. "I'm on the Serve Team when school's in."

"Gonna sleep in till nine," said Terrance with relish. "Church don't start till ten."

"Wish I could sleep in till nine." Chuck sounded wistful.

"Yours starts at eight thirty-two, right?"

"Yup."

"The hell kind of time is eight thirty-two?" Dean said.

Eyes turned to him—not scandalized (which just irritated him more), but impassive as ever.

"From the Book of John," Chuck said.

"Oh. Right. Of course. Sorry, I forgot."

"Where you go to praise?" Terrance asked.

"The shower, mainly," said Dean, but no one laughed.

Mark said, "You shouldn't talk like trash." It was the first time he'd ever risen to—well, anything, and it took Dean by surprise. But then Mark made the mistake of following it up with, "Families that don't have a community don't have anybody looking out for them."

Dean smiled tightly. "My family looks out for itself."

Mark's eyes bored into him, as flat and expressionless as his voice.

"Ten-fifteen!" hollered Coleson, and they picked themselves up and went back to work.

It was a routine day: work, walk home from the Wam Squam, strip off on the stoop, straight to the shower. Dean had a luxurious hour to himself before he'd have to leave to pick up Sam, so he decided to take his time.

Pamela Anderson had been his go-to for a while now, but an even more tantalizing fantasy presented itself when he took himself in hand. It wore flip-flops. It spoke in an accent that suggested languid nights curtained with Spanish moss rather than kinship with his barn-blasting colleagues. It parted plum-colored lips that were only slightly asymmetrical as it sank down, down, down: a position of power indeed.

Pamela undeniably had better tits, but if you couldn't be with the rack you loved, love the rack it seemed distantly plausible you might get a shot at groping.

Dean was just wondering about the texture when things were abruptly over, so, feeling cheated, he stayed in long enough to try for another one.

When eventually he wandered out, he drew up short at the sight of his father bent over the countertop that divided kitchen from living room, and at the books and map covering it.

Dad being here at all was surprising enough; whatever he was working on, it absorbed him completely from the minute he dropped Dean off in the mornings to the hour of evening PT, and then absorbed him some more for the hours after that. Dean hadn't had to cede the TV remote even once since they'd gotten here. But the research material being out in plain sight like this, after all the weeks he'd been frozen out, was almost surreal.

The timing was conspicuous: Dean was here, Sam was not.

Dad tipped his head toward one of the swivel stools bolted in front of the counter, which was also the trailer's only dining table. "Have a seat, Dean."

Doing his utmost to keep his hope from showing, Dean did. "What's all this stuff?" he asked, hastily adding a "sir."

"You ever hear of the Devil's Tramping Ground?"

"No, sir." Should he have? Had Dad told him at some point? Was he going to lose his chance to redeem himself before he even truly got it?

 _"The_ Devil's Tramping Ground, it's just a tall tale." Dad laid pictures out on the map, and Dean relaxed. "It's a clearing up Route 421; legend goes that the Devil throws anything people put in there out of the circle, keeping it clear so he can dance." Dean snorted before he could stop himself, but this only earned him a surprising smile from his father. "Yeah. Who knows, maybe Satan likes Abba. Anyway, I already checked it out just to be sure and yeah, it's a dead end. But devils' tramping grounds generally—there might be something in those."

He pulled some Xeroxes from a stack, citing different pieces of lore as Dean scanned them: crooked houses, devils' gates, haunting hotspots, thin places.

"Places where things can come through," Dean realized out loud.

Dad hesitated almost imperceptibly. "Yes." He handed Dean another copy, this one from microfiche. "Surge in traffic fatalities over the last three months, all in the same twenty-mile radius. Keeps climbing. Authorities are blaming it on drunk driving, of course, but they don't know what we know."

 _They don't know what we know._ The words should have been chilling, but they'd always made Dean warm.

"I think there's something here," Dad said. "Imp could fit. Maybe even a gytrash. If it came through a spot like that, I could banish it, but I'd have to find the place first. Been looking, but, well, there's a lot of ground here, and none of my leads have panned. I'm thinking a different kind of canvassing might be needed. Which is where you come in."

Dean felt switched on, focused in a way he hadn't for weeks. "What can I do?"

"I want you to talk to the local kids. Find out if there's anywhere special—places people talk about, places they don't go, places that feel wrong. Places with a reputation. Don't just wander up to people like you're trying to convert them; get them to trust you first. It's a Saturday. Coleson phoned to say the Crew's not working tomorrow. Think you can find some kids your own age and get them talking?"

The words themselves were neutral, but the way Dad looked him in the eye told Dean everything he needed to know: this was a hall pass. He was being paroled. Maybe, just maybe, even let out early on good behavior.

"Totally! Sir."

"Good. And Dean?" From his shirt pocket, Dad produced a square foil packet. He waited pointedly until Dean, blushing to the roots of his hair, took it. "This is the Bible Belt. Last time we were here, you were young enough that none of this mattered, but while I'm not encouraging you to need that, I also know it's only a matter of time before you do." Dean recollected the Talk he'd received on his previous birthday, then did his utmost not to. "There are rules in this part of the country: no boys, no Black girls, no preachers' daughters. Are we clear?"

Dean hadn't thought he could blush harder. "Crystal. Sir."

"All right." Dad hooked a thumb backwards at a plate of sandwiches beside the sink. "Eat up and head out."

"I'm supposed to pick Sam up soon," Dean said, yearning not to.

"Don't worry about it, I'll get him." Dad consulted his watch. "Be back by… three a.m., latest."

So this was what winning the lotto felt like. "Yes, sir. Will do, sir. Thank you, sir."

* * *

"Kristina can't come to the phone," a woman's voice said tartly.

Dean had been warned of this. "Don't call after five on a weekday—with a _K,_ not _Ch_ —or between twelve and three or after nine on weekends," Kristina had told him. "My mama'll tell you I can't talk and I'll call you back."

Weird, but okay.

Sure enough, about ten minutes later, the phone rang on the trailer wall. "Who's this?" were Kristina's first words.

"Dean. Dean Winchester. Remember me?"

Sounds of a mattress bouncing, as of a body being thrown down on it. "Sure. How are you, Dean?"

"Bored," he said, "and free." Had he thought talking to this girl intimidating less than a week ago? This day was his; he could feel it in his blood. He owned it, and it was going to be glorious. "Is there anyplace to go around here?"

"Whole big lake right there," she said, but somehow he just knew it wasn't a blow-off.

Dean thought of her makeup, her fashion choices, her sardonic commentary on churches, her whole _deal._ "I was hoping for something a little weirder," he said. "Someplace the normal people around here don't go."

"Hmm." Fake contemplation. "I might know a place. Do you like Randy Travis?"

"Who?"

"Good, you pass. Meet me at the water tower in an hour. Bring some music."

The water tower was easy to find. It was short, as water towers went, but still the tallest object in Jewel Lake except perhaps the Goldston's ferris wheel. It lay about halfway between the church and Melton's Motor Court, aka home, down a dirt lane behind the little fire station this place had. A 1970s Jeep Cherokee was pulled up on the grass under it, and when she saw Dean coming, Kristina hopped down off the hood. "Dean!"

A guy a couple years older than Kristina leant against the side of the Jeep smoking a cigarette. He was clearly the owner of the car. Dean did not own a car. Dean could not legally drive a car. Dean hated this person on sight.

"Who's this?" he asked amiably.

"This is my cousin Carl." Kristina bounced up and took Dean's hand. The sight of her short, unpainted nails on his fingers and the word _cousin_ lifted his spirits considerably. "He's gonna give us a ride into town to hang out down by the river. You brought music?"

Dean held up a grocery bag with some cassettes at the bottom. "Don't have a player right now, though," he admitted.

"That's okay. Let's get out of here."

They took 701 past the lake, past the Wam Squam, and then through open country toward the nearest _real_ town, which was Bethel, ten miles away. The open country consisted of white sand, pine trees, and flatness.

Bethel lay on the other side of the Cape Fear River. Up here, the Cape Fear was a muddy stream barely a hundred meters across, but it would widen to an estuary twenty times that before draining into the Atlantic in Wilmington fifty miles away. They passed over several smaller bridges before they hit the Cape Fear, though, crossing not creeks but pocosins. Dean had learned the word from Bubba, who was a surprising well of such facts: big basins of pine and cypress just a foot or two lower than the surrounding area, which was enough to turn them into semi-permanent swamp.

Pine needles steeped in the water there, turning it red and acidic with tannins. The pocosins drained via a creek that fed Jewel Lake itself. The water on the side with all the tourism was quite clear, kept relatively free of algae by the low pH, but Dean had heard via the Crew that on the other end of the lake, where the creek emptied under the shadow of the thickets, it was the color of blood. That was probably an exaggeration.

Riding shotgun, Kristina seemed in high spirits. "Is Kyle gonna be there?" she asked her cousin.

"Yeah."

"What about Mindy and Lacey?"

"Yeah."

Dean rested his elbows on the backs of either front seat, leaning forward into the gap to participate in the conversation. Like the Crew, Carl was on the taciturn side, but he lacked their creepy impassivity. On the contrary, Dean found the open annoyance with which the guy eyed him downright refreshing.

"So what's this place where we're going?"

"It's just a place," said Kristina, like that explained everything.

Which it more or less did. On the other side of the Cape Fear bridge, Carl turned left at the gas station that marked the start of Bethel, and then eventually left again down a lane marked DEAD END. When it terminated, he got out, removed a wire rope strung across a green tunnel in the undergrowth, and nosed the Cherokee down the rutted path beyond until they emerged onto a silty bluff shaded by maples. A couple more cars and a dirt bike were already there, and kids were sitting around a cold fire ring overlooking the river.

This was familiar ground. Dean might not know anybody here, but he'd been finding his way to spots like this for years now. Every backwater town had one. A quick scan of the company told him that yes, three quarters of these people were older than he was, that they all knew each other, and that the pecking order had long since been established, but he knew something they didn't. He saw—lived—behind a curtain that they didn't even know was there. When the sun went down and they lit a fire in the ring, he'd be the only one who knew what lay beyond its light. They were here to be dumbass kids; Dean was here on a mission. His father was M, and that made Dean James Bond.

He ambled up to the fire ring and plopped down on a free log. Eight or nine pairs of eyes turned to him. He smiled sunnily. "How y'all doing?"

* * *

This was not the social set of the Crew. No one here joined hands for prayer circles before football games or belonged to church Serve Teams. The girls were slutty; the guys were delinquent. These were the misfits of Beulah County.

As a general rule, Dean didn't think of himself as a misfit. Misfits were people who had tried and failed to win acceptance, and he didn't _try._ He certainly didn't fail. He simply existed apart, already a member of a corps that would always outrank mere school cliques. At least, he had been. At the moment, though, the corps was distinctly frayed around the edges, and the company of what Jewel Lake considered Normal People for enough mornings in a row made being an outcast look like a badge of honor.

Kristina sat on the next log with a couple of girlfriends, one slim leg angled so her anklet caught the sun.

It was stifling-warm in the shade, poundingly hot in the sun. Up here, the ground was not sand but powdery silt, and there was enough of an elevation change between them and the river below that the dropoff could plausibly be called a cliff (a huge novelty in the eastern Carolinas). The river smelled dank, but when Kristina turned her face into the barely-there breeze off it, it lifted her hair in a way that was pretty nice.

A high school junior named Curtis tossed a Mountain Dew bottle into the empty fire ring. "Gonna take a leak. Bet I can hit the river."

"Bet you can't."

"Bet I can." Curtis went off to try it.

"I wish it'd just _rain_ already," said Kristina. "Feel like I'm coming out of my skin."

"You'll get your wish tomorrow," said cousin Carl.

"Hear we'll get six inches," said Mindy.

"No, we _won't."_ —Lacey.

"No, I heard that, too." A guy named Shelby, poor bastard. "River's gonna flood for sure."

"Hey!" called Curtis. "There's a dead dog or somethin'!"

They all went to look.

"Curtis, you dumb fuck, that ain't a dog."

"I said 'or somethin','" Curtis pointed out.

He had unzipped on a sunny spot where the silt was packed into a hard, rounded bluff that fell away into a dead drop thirty feet or so down to the river. At the bottom, vivid in the sunlight, a group of vultures hunched over a four-legged body with hooves.

"I think it's a goat," said Dean.

"Who the hell's got goats around here?"

"Dunno, but that's what it is," an older boy agreed.

Dean stared down at the goat. Its legs were broken from the fall. Neck, too. The vultures' shoulders moved as they worked inside the carcass.

Curtis hit one of them with a rock and whooped as it took flight, cawing. Another just settled in its place. Other stones were less well aimed, and the birds soon barely bothered to hop when the kids threw them. They squatted over the body, nosing in under the skin like lovers.

One of them suddenly looked straight up at Dean. It was different from the others somehow, a different color maybe, _wrong._ Probably it was just a different species, but Dean couldn't shake the feeling that it was looking him in the eye.

A Jeep Wrangler came buzzing down the hill just then, and Curtis whooped again. The Wrangler parked and a tall, lanky guy of eighteen or nineteen climbed out with a case of Coors. Everyone instantly abandoned the goat.

The newcomer grinned, big and handsome and full of shit, and placed the beer in the middle of the empty fire ring with a flourish. "Y'all are _welcome."_

Everyone jostled for seats around the beer. The new arrival, who was being greeted by the oldest and hottest of the girls and glad-handing the older guys, passed a look of mild curiosity over Dean. "Who're you?"

Kristina sat down next to Dean. "Kyle, this is Dean. He's staying down at the lake."

Dean grinned back. "Hiya."

Kyle's look soured briefly at Dean's chutzpah, but he seemed to dismiss it, busying himself with ripping into the 24-pack and handing those near him (mostly female) cans. Everyone else was digging into the beer without invitation, including Kristina, so Dean reached for one, too.

Dean had celebrated his most recent birthday a day late, since he and his father had been finishing up a haunting in Ohio. Well, Dad, mostly, but Dean had helped. Sort of. Anyway, they'd finished, checked in with Sam, and crossed the state line, and Dad had stopped at a convenience store after taking Dean for burgers. Dean had not known to expect an agenda, but Dad had laid the program of events out for him without preamble.

First up had been the Talk, which had been as frustrating as it had been awkward. A lecture on safe sex had just underscored the fact that Dean wasn't having any. It hadn't told him much he hadn't heard or seen already, either, though he did trust Dad's information more than Evan Cully-Foster's. Then Dad had produced a six-pack of Bud and invited Dean to start drinking.

"I want you to know what it feels like," he'd said. "I want you to find out now, here, and not in the middle of a situation you're not in control of surrounded by people you don't know. So go ahead. Have as much as you want."

Halfway through the first can, Dean had felt the buzz. He'd only had sips before, not enough to feel anything. The taste was still vile, but the buzz was great. He'd told his father as much. By the end of the first can, he'd been a bit past buzzed.

"Want another?" Dad had asked him.

"Yeah!"

The memory got a bit fragmentary after that. Dean had felt himself detached and floating. At some point, he must have laid down, because he had a distinct recollection of the water stain on the ceiling. It had been shaped like a panda.

"I think I'm drunk," he'd said.

"Yep."

"Wow. Wow."

"Now, try to walk over to the window."

Dean had tried. It hadn't gone great.

Next Dad had pinned a target on the wall—he must have brought the thing with him—and handed Dean a ball, one of the bouncy ones out of a coin machine. "Hit that."

Child's play from three times the distance. Dean's throw had hit the wall five feet wide, rebounded, ricocheted off the ceiling, and knocked over one of his empties. His last clear memory of the evening was of the walls spinning and his father's voice:

"I want you to remember how helpless you are right now. Next time someone hands you a bottle or a can, and don't you ever take an open cup you didn't pour yourself, I want you to remember this feeling and imagine a spirit finding you like this. Imagine a werewolf. Imagine a bigger guy who wants your wallet. Imagine Sam with you. If you want to drink, fine. But outside of this room, never be drunker than anyone else you're with."

Or something like that. _Clear_ memory was a bit of an overstatement.

In the present, Dean popped the tab on his can. "You even tasted beer before?" asked Todd with a trace of amusement. The upperclassman girls with him giggled, watching Dean like he was a cute puppy.

Well, he could work with that. Dean clinked with Kristina, who grinned at him, and took a sip disguised as a long pull.

Alcohol soon atomized the group. Couples and threesomes drifted away from the fire ring and into battered aluminum lawn chairs, onto car hoods, onto logs at the edges of the clearing. Dean and Kristina hopped up onto the tailgate of the Cherokee. Kristina fished out a Walkman and nodded at his bag of cassettes. "What'd you bring?"

Dean started to tell her, then got a better idea. "I'll show you." He held out his hand for the Walkman.

He considered the contents of the bag carefully. He had Zeppelin IV in here, with "When the Levee Breaks" as its finale. He imagined introducing Kristina to that: the rhythmic churn, like the roll and snap of hips; the sound, he'd become certain at thirteen, of sex itself. His mind supplied a very appealing picture of how it might affect her. But that wasn't the place to start, not with Curtis urinating ten yards away and the sun not even setting yet. He clicked a different tape into the slot and held the headphones to his ear while he searched for the track he wanted. Then he handed them to her. She settled the little foam disks over her ears and raised her eyebrows at him.

Heart beating a little quickly, feeling suddenly and oddly exposed, Dean watched her face. First she pursed her lips, like she was waiting to see where this went before passing judgment. Her head did begin to dip in time with the beat, though. By the thirty second mark, her expression had moved from skeptical to thoughtful.

She wasn't convinced all at once: bit by bit her eyes went more unfocused, and it wasn't until the end of the first chorus that she really bought in. As Hetfield embarked on the second verse, she had one fist clenched and was mouthing the words at a lag, and by the time Lars hit his drum solo, she was pounding that fist on her thigh with the beat of _Lie! Lie! Lie! Lie!_

She jabbed the pause button and whipped off the headset. There was a wild look in her eye that made Dean feel powerful in a way he only ever had before dropping a black dog or squeezing off a tight grouping.

"Who is this?"

His grin hurt. "Metallica. 'Leper Messiah.'"

"Who're they?"

"Wait, you've never _heard_ of Metallica before?"

"My parents are strict. What else is on here?" she demanded.

"Here." He took the headset and fast-forwarded madly. He'd meant to hold this one in reserve, but that had been half a beer and five minutes of "Leper Messiah" ago. Greatly daring, Dean held up the headset and waited. She blushed. She definitely blushed, and then she brushed her hair back and leaned forward to let Dean settle the flimsy headphones over her ears. One of his fingers just skimmed her cheek as he drew back. It was soft. A bit oily, slightly tacky with foundation, but mostly soft. He hit play.

Her eyes widened at the opening horn blast and bell toll. He didn't need to hear anything to know exactly where she was in the song. When the beat dropped, her lips parted almost exactly like his fantasy, and Dean pitched a tent on the spot.

Kristina closed her eyes and started to sway, brushing her knee against his in a sweaty, electrifying point of contact. There was nothing unconscious about it, he could tell, but that only made it better. That meant she wanted him to see her like this: absorbed, captivated, _digging_ it.

Something vindicated and vindictive burned in Dean's chest. She understood Metallica. Dad didn't understand Metallica. Sam had never understood Metallica. Hell, Sam complained if he so much as turned on the radio.

_What I've felt_  
_What I've known_  
_Never shined through in what I've shown_  
_Never be_  
_Never see_  
_Won't see what might have been_

Kristina braced the heels of her hands on the tailgate, turned her face up to the sun, and swayed to the beat. Dean watched her hair dangle behind her and her breasts strain under her shirt.

_What I've felt_  
_What I've known_  
_Never shined through in what I've shown_  
_Never free_  
_Never me_  
_So I dub thee—_

"Hey!" The tailgate bounced as Curtis plunked down on it. "What're you listening to?"

Kristina whipped around to glare at him. "Go _away,_ Curtis."

Dean punched pause. "Seriously, man?"

"'M just curious." Curtis's cigarette mouth waggled with his words, waving smoke everywhere. "What is it? Izzit Nirvana?"

He made a grab for Kristina's headphones, and she smacked his hand away. He grabbed again and she kicked him. He opened his mouth to protest and the cigarette fell out. It landed on Dean's wrist, causing him to yelp and drop the Walkman just as Kristina shoved Curtis off the tailgate wholesale. Curtis pinwheeled his arms to keep balance, caught the outflung cord connecting headphones to Walkman, and sent the player whanging into a tree.

Kristina jumped to her feet. "Damn it, Curtis! Why you have to be such a dumb drunk?"

"Aw, shit, Kristina, I'm sorry."

She retrieved and tested the player. "It's broken, you asshole!"

"I'll get you a new one," Curtis said earnestly. "I'm real sorry."

"How? You're always broker than the mirror your mother looked in. You have _any_ idea what it took to get that? You know my dad'll never—" She bit whatever she was going to say back and glared some more.

"Well, you don't have to be a bitch about it," said Shelby, who'd come up to help Curtis up off the ground.

That set Kristina's temper off all over again. She balled her hands into fists and got into his face. "What'd you say to me?"

"I said—"

"Hey, whoa, whoa!" Dean stepped between Shelby and Kristina. "Back off, man."

Shelby looked down at him in disbelief. Really looked down; he was half a head taller. When Dean just stared right back, Shelby's disbelief morphed into amusement. Dean took a step forward.

Kristina tugged on his arm, so he stopped. Shelby, who'd just developed the brains to start to look uncertain about things, snorted and smacked Curtis on the arm. "C'mon, you gotta sober up before I take you back."

Curtis dusted the seat of his pants. "I really am sorry," he told Kristina one more time.

"Oh, go away."

The semicircle of onlookers they'd accrued trickled off when Curtis and Shelby did. "Let me see that?" Dean said.

Kristina gave him the Walkman. The case was intact, but something rattled when he turned it over.

"I think I can fix this."

"Seriously?"

"Yeah," he said, having no earthly idea what was wrong with it.

She looked up (well, across) at him in a way he liked very much. "You'd be my hero."

Kyle came up and presented both of them with fresh silver cans. "Sorry 'bout your player. Y'all wanna play Fuzzy Duck?"

The beer flowed. The sun went down. A few kids left; a few more appeared in their place. An actual fire appeared in the fire ring. A pack of cigarettes went around the circle. When a girl in twelfth grade offered it to Kristina, Carl said, "She doesn't smoke."

"Who says I don't?" said Kristina. She'd finished another beer; her cheeks were pink and her eyes shone.

"Your father," said Carl dryly.

Her answer was to extract a cigarette, though she looked a little awkward holding it. She rattled the few sticks remaining at Dean. "You want?"

Dean'd tried a few times. The first had been at eleven, from a classmate the same age in the hayloft of a barn. He'd turned his lungs inside out after the first puff and passed on the rest. Embracing that kind of discomfort just to prove he could hadn't started to become appealing until about a year later, at which point he'd gotten through a few whole ones on a basketball court in Flushing. They hadn't actually been all that satisfying, though. Hunting was a better buzz. But when in Rome.

He leaned forward to light his cigarette in the bonfire and Kristina imitated him, trying not to look like she was. He inhaled. She inhaled. She doubled over coughing. The rest of the circle burst out laughing, but not in a mean-spirited way. Kristina looked up with her eyes streaming and grinned.

The last of the twilight was fading. Dean cleared his throat. "So I was wondering," he asked while Mindy and Carl coached Kristina through the rest of her cigarette. "There any weird places around here?"

"What do you mean?" asked a junior girl, curious but open.

"You know. Strange."

"Stranger than your face, Winchester?" called Danny, who was the second-dumbest fuck after Curtis.

"Strange like… bad," said Dean, unperturbed. "Someplace where when you go there, it just feels wrong."

"Why're you asking?" asked Kyle.

"Just heard there was one, is all."

That prompted a flurry of conversation. "I heard a witch lives in the woods on the other side of the lake," said Danny.

"Danny, you're so full of shit. It's private land, that's all. My uncle owns a parcel. I been all over it, nothing like that there."

"My cousin Alice went to the burned out house next to the cemetery down 53 on a dare once. Said she'd never go back there again, peed her pants."

"There was a slaughterhouse in Garland before Smithfield came in and bought everything. It don't run no more but there's still somebody in there. Lives there. Some _Texas Chainsaw Massacre_ shit."

More tales of this caliber percolated for a while; Dean filed the details away. The conversation segued naturally into ghost stories, but none that sounded like a match for Dad's intel. A bottle of Jim Beam started making the rounds.

Dean took a swig from it without a thought. It burned on the way down, filling his body with gorgeous warmth. He welcomed it. He still wasn't drunker than anybody else here, he was sure.

Even whiskey wasn't enough to help Danny's storytelling, though, and once again the group began to drift. At least one couple was within eyeshot over by the edge of the cliff, necking. Kristina took Dean's hand and stood up.

They found a log set a little ways back into the woods, not too far back for the firelight to find them but screened at least somewhat from view. Dean's pulse picked up pleasantly.

Kristina, though, seemed pensive. "There's nothing to do here," she said. "There's never anything to do here."

"I dunno, this is fun."

"I guess. I hardly ever get to leave the lake, though." She scratched a mosquito bite absently "Where're you from?"

"Kansas," he said, "but we haven't been there since I was a kid. We go all over. 'Cause of my dad's business, you know. Lived in New York City once."

That got her attention. "Really?"

"Yeah."

"I wanna go to New York."

"The Big Apple's badass," said Dean, who'd seen little of it outside of a second-story efficiency suite at the corner of Tinton and East 147th.

"I wish I could get out of this place."

"It doesn't seem so bad," said Dean.

She scoffed. "Then you haven't been here long enough." She watched firelight play on a nearby clump of poison ivy. "My aunt'll take me," she said. "She's in Durham, says I'm welcome any time, but my dad won't let me go."

"You wanna get away from your dad that bad?"

"God, yes."

Rational analysis would have told Dean that sympathy and understanding was the way to go with a girl he'd maneuvered (okay, been maneuvered by) into a secluded, firelit corner, but he was pretty buzzed. Rational analysis had taken a backseat. He snorted. "Like him _wanting_ you is the worst thing he could do."

Kristina's nostrils flared. "He doesn't _want_ me," she said. "It's got nothing to do with loving us. It's about controlling us. You don't know anything. It's like being a prisoner. He gets mad when I wear pants and he won't let me out of the house in anything above the knee whether it's fifty degrees out or a hundred. Know why I blew up at Curtis like that? I keep that Walkman in a Tupperware under a plank in the water tower, 'cause we're not allowed to listen to any music he doesn't pick. We can't have a damn _radio_ because maybe we'll hear something he doesn't approve of. All he cares about is how we make him look. He doesn't give a shit about what we want or our future, he just expects us to fall in line." She was on her feet, hands balled into fists.

Dean opened his mouth and shut it again. "He really doesn't let you have a radio?" he said finally.

"Yes!"

"Okay, that's different," he admitted. "Not being allowed to listen to _music?"_

She smiled, big and brittle. "Oh, but modern music is all full of sex and drugs and bad words."

Was there any worth listening to that wasn't? Dean tried to imagine if someone pried Zeppelin IV out of his hands. "That's nuts."

"What I've been trying to _tell_ you."

"So what're you going to do?"

She sat back down and gazed moodily into the distance again, picking unconsciously at a cuticle. "Dunno. I have to convince him to let me go somehow. Except he doesn't listen to anybody. But there's no way I'll make it another three years."

It wasn't the same. Her dad was some kind of psycho Focus on the Family tyrant. Nothing like his own father, nothing like Sam's.

"You kept saying 'we,'" Dean said. "You mean you and your mom?"

"No, me and my sister. She's the only one who cares about me." Her cuticle-picking intensified; her eyes shone in the fire. "We've got a pact. If I can just figure out a way to get out of here, I'm going to come back for her when I turn eighteen."

Dean stared at the fire, too, but he couldn't see whatever Kristina did. His buzz was all but gone and he wanted it back. "I'm gonna see if there's any whiskey left," he said.

Kristina perked up at that. "Pour some in my empty and bring it back?" she asked, proffering an empty Coors.

"Good thinking."

There was indeed whiskey, and Dean managed to slip a couple swallows into the beer can while its owner urinated. On the way back, he passed three couples who were sucking face and two guys who were watching them.

"What's your dad do?" asked Kristina as he handed her the can.

"He's a salesman." He swallowed his half of the whiskey; it was sour with the dregs of the Coors, but it brought that warmth he'd wanted coursing back into his veins. "What about yours?"

"My dad's a kind of salesman, too." She drained the other half.

He scooted closer to her on the log. She scooted closer to him on the log. He turned his head. She turned hers. The alcohol and cigarettes layered on her breath smelled like the back of a shitty bar, but Dean had to assume his was no better, so with a mental shrug and butterflies in his stomach, he closed the distance.

It was a little like his first time sparring a chain combination against Sam: he understood the concept generally and had practiced going through the motions; the rehearsal didn't translate that well to the realities of another body in motion against his, but for the first several seconds his brain was too busy tracking everything that was going on to panic about his lack of finesse. By the time he had the wherewithal for self-consciousness in this case, he could also tell that she was no better off.

The beer and cigarette tastes lapsed into the neutral flavor of spit. It was slobbery and rubbery in a way he hadn't expected, but the fact remained: he was kissing a girl. No: he was _making out_ with a girl. The realization alone was enough to make him pop wood.

Kristina, shifting her position on the log, brushed up against it and sprang back. She looked startled, and Dean's stomach had just dropped with the certainty that he had freaked this girl right out and she was about to run away, when she got this sort of determined look on her face and inched in closer to him again. Dean breathed heavily, feeling flushed and hectic. Kristina got a smug gleam in her eye, and this time when she leaned in Dean could feel her grinning against his mouth.

Dean had a series of revelations in quick succession: she knew she had him by the balls. She liked it. He liked that she liked it.

They surfaced for air a few minutes later. Their commingled breath still didn't smell that great, but even that was as exciting as it was queasy. It stood as proof that this was theirs.

"I wish I could play you something," Dean burst out. "I'm going to fix your player, I swear."

He was. He needed to give it to someone, everything he felt, and this girl was the only one who wanted to receive it.

She looked taken aback by his vehemence, but she didn't pull away this time. She blushed, and she looked down, which she'd never done before, but she smiled and put a shy hand on his shoulder. "I'd like that," she said, and something raw and desperate in Dean that was straining under his skin all the time felt almost, but almost, as if it could breathe.

She tipped her face up to his again.

It went better this time. Smoother; more rhythmic. Her hand landed on his knee and crept upward, only to stop several inches south of its promised destination. He put his hand on her side, and she let him inch it up and up and up only to wiggle sideways just as the flesh under his palm started to curve. She did the thing with her hand on his thigh again and he felt her smirk against his lips.

She pulled back and left him licking his lips wide-eyed. She had a look of wonder at her power over him and a wicked light in her eyes. She stood and stuck her hand out. "Come on."

He let her pull him out into the clearing with an obvious tent in his shorts, both of them grinning like they'd won the World Series together. "Let's go to Goldston's," announced Kristina to the group.

* * *

Forty dollars of hog parlor largess in his pocket felt reassuring and powerful, like a spare clip loaded with .45 rounds. Dean paid his and Kristina's $3 entry fee at the gate. He bought them cotton candy and Cokes. He bought her a go in one of the shooting galleries, then himself one to win her a prize when she couldn't hit anything.

"My hero," she sing-songed, and it was definitely mocking now they were both sober, but it turned his crank just like all the rest of her teasing did.

She wasn't much at bumper cars, though. She hugged the rails, playing the defensive game and shrieking whenever someone hit her. Sam had always had an affinity for the bumper cars. He was vicious when he played, found attack vectors through the smallest gaps, came up behind Dean and slammed him face-first into walls. Bumper cars didn't feel like it had as much point without someone personally angling for his pain.

Dean had planned to take them both on the Tilt-a-Whirl and the mini-coaster, but by the time they got out of the bumper cars, these and even inferior rides were all closed.

"How come?" Kristina argued with the attendant.

"Weather," the guy told her. "We're gonna be shutting down early, too. Gate's closing at one o'clock, so get your last rides if you want 'em."

That was two hours earlier than the three a.m. advertised for the peak season. "But the storms aren't due until tomorrow!" Dean said.

The attendant reacted about as much as the Crew would have. "One o'clock," he repeated.

"Ah, man," Dean said, "the only thing left open is the ferris wheel."

"You don't like ferris wheels?"

 _"The_ lamest ride."

"I kind of like them," said Kristina. "The lights are pretty from up top."

"Oh, hey, they're loading now," said Dean.

They caught the third-to-last seat on the last ride. Dean looped the grocery bag with the Walkman and his tapes around the safety bar, and Kristina laughed a little breathlessly when their cart started rising into the air. "I'm afraid of heights."

"So you like ferris wheels?"

"Exactly."

It was a pretty big wheel for the size of the park. Not even halfway up, they could see all of Goldston's spread beneath them: the bumper cars and arcade on the right, the buffets and gift shops and boardwalk on the left. The fence bounding all of it extended some meters into the water to prevent gate-skippers. Smack in the middle, the T-shaped pier stretched out into the lake, a fleet of paddleboats and a baker's dozen of jet skis to rent on either side. It sucked that now he was finally in here, the place was closing early.

The pier was picked out in a string of golden lights running down its length, and Dean could just see the couples dotted along it. Shit, he should have thought of that. He bet a high school guy would've thought of that.

A stiff breeze coming off the lake lent credence to the thing about the weather. It was strong and constant, completely unlike what usually passed for wind down here, which was more like a heat-sick god passing gas from on high. It rocked the cart pretty hard when the angle was right, and Kristina grabbed his hand, clutching the safety bar with the other.

"I got you." Dean anchored her with an arm around her waist on instinct. Her hair smelled like smoke and fruity shampoo.

She exhaled on a laugh and curled into his side. He startled for a second when her hand landed on his chest and nothing pressed into his skin before he remembered he hadn't been wearing the necklace to lose it.

They rose higher. Her hand slipped down to his knee. He angled in for a kiss. The taste layered sweet over acrid, cotton candy over ash. She adjusted her grip on his arm when she turned to meet him, like she honestly was afraid of falling out of the car, and the back of her wrist bumped his painful stiffy.

Like before, she startled at the feel of it; like before, she recovered, faster this time. They still weren't very good at this, but they were figuring it out by degrees. It was still slobbery, and rubbery, but Dean's hindbrain could tell that there was something else it was supposed to be, and it kept up a single-minded leopard crawl toward that undiscovered country.

Kristina pulled back as they neared the top. "This is the best part," she said.

Below them, the lake was a black disk fringed in twinkling lights. The lights were thickest to either side of them, from motels and trailer rentals and the docks those all had, but they continued in a waning crescent most of the way around. Only the far northern shore was completely dark, and something about that made Dean uneasy out of nowhere. He knew from riding to work daily that there was no vast forest up there—just a strip of haphazard growth sandwiched between the lake and the angle made by 701 and NC-53—but looking at it from across the water, the darkness felt like it had no boundary. Like anything might come out of it.

Kristina's voice interrupted his thoughts, uncharacteristically shy. "Dean?"

"Uh, yeah?"

She pulled back part way to look at him. "Have you ever, you know… _done_ it?"

Oh. Oh, holy shit. Oh, fuck.

What did he say? The truth? Almost certainly not. "Yeah, a few times. I mean. You know. Kinda."

Momentary annoyance flickered over her face, swiftly replaced with awe. "Is it as good as it's supposed to be? I heard, well, my friend has a friend who says she did it and it was good but it hurt like hell."

Okay, this Dean had the answer to. "He wasn't doing it right," he said immediately and in perfect confidence.

"No?"

"No! If it hurts, he's not doing it right." He had only blurry imaginings of what doing it right looked like, built on Penthouse and Hustler and that one awkward talk on his fourteenth birthday ( _go slow, swab the deck, send a strategic reconnaissance team ahead, always wait for orders from high command before deploying spearhead force_ )—but his father had told him that much, and Dean's faith in the information was absolute.

Kristina looked up at him with big eyes. "I'd like to do it. Some day. But I'm a little scared, because of all the things people say." She laughed a little. "I hope it's like riding the ferris wheel."

Thoughts dried up in Dean's brain like the saliva in his mouth.

"I'd like to do it with someone I can trust," she went on. "Someone I can really count on, you know?"

Dean swallowed. "Totally."

She bit her lip. Her hair hung twisted over one shoulder, leaving the other bare. "Can— Can I count on you, Dean?"

He opened his mouth to answer in fervent affirmative, something that would assure her of his extreme trustworthiness but also of his cool, James Bond-like, worldly expertise—

"Gotta get off, son, we're closin'."

The safety bar wrenched upward. Kristina alighted onto the platform. Dean followed a bit less gracefully. He hated walking with a boner.

On the asphalt beside the ferris wheel, Kristina stood, blushing furiously but smiling. It made Dean grin, too. They shared something now, even if it was only an idea, and it made him feel at once weak and brave.

"I better be getting home. Thanks for taking me on the rides, and for the cotton candy."

"Yeah, me, too. Getting home, I mean. Can I, uh, walk you anywhere?"

"Oh. No, that's okay, I live close. Anyways, I gotta sneak back in."

"How're you gonna do that? You sure I can't give you a hand? Not to brag or anything, but I'm kind of an expert at sneaking into places."

"My little sister helps me. We got a system. We always make a plan ahead, and then I throw a pebble at her window when it's time."

"Must be nice to have a sister you can count on like that."

"It is."

Dean cleared his throat awkwardly. "Okay. Well, see you."

One more shy smile. "See you."

* * *

Technically Dean still had over an hour left before his curfew when he got back to the trailer, but the wind was really picking up, and the first fat raindrops hit him as he turned in at the motor court sign.

The Impala was missing from her spot out front. Dean was surprised their father wasn't there, and also reminded abruptly that he'd turned up next to nothing in the way of usable intel. Shit. Maybe Dad would let him try again in a night or two.

He let himself in quietly, just in case Dad really _was_ home and just parked elsewhere, but the door to the master bedroom was ajar, the space beyond empty. Maybe he'd picked up a lead of his own.

Dean discarded caution after that. He was going to have a shower, jerk off at least twice, and sleep in the next day till the hour hit double digits. Humming "Got You By the Balls," he shouldered through the door to the second bedroom, hit the light, and stopped dead.

The overhead light in here was weak, 40 watts shedding a glow out of a glass dome crowded with dead bugs, but it didn't have to illuminate much space. The beds against the walls were the size of train berths and separated by an aisle just wide enough to fit a nightstand at the end of it. On the first bed, Dean's after-work towel sat in a damp spot. On the second, Sam was having a nightmare.

Usually Sam jerked and twitched in his bad dreams. Thrashed. Kicked. Fast, skittish motions clenched tight on his side, covers tangled and cast off, and he woke up on a hair trigger. Now he lay on his back under the blanket, writhing ferris wheel-slow. Dean watched mesmerized. Sam's face was pinched, his breath heavy in his mouth. His whole body undulated in that unnerving slow motion. The blanket shifted, showed the points of his knees and elbows through it, the upward strain of his chest, then his hips. His lips parted on a barely-there sound of denial.

Sam's head and neck stretched back. Dean flashed on an image of a tortoise on its back, under a sky with a carrion eater in it.

He unfroze and shook Sam's shoulder through the blanket. "Sammy."

Winchesters were not heavy sleepers. Each of them was conditioned to wake to a silent touch from another, as practiced in that as they were in going to sleep with the others active around them in the first place. Sam didn't rouse.

Dean shook harder. "Sammy! Sammy, wake up."

Sam's mouth opened and closed. A quiet, "Huhh—" came out of it.

Fear almost beyond emotion took hold of Dean. He leant all the way over his brother, gripping both his arms, shaking him hard, an instinctive call for his father barely aborted when Sam finally opened his eyes on a stifled little cry.

They stared at each other for a minute before Sam started sobbing.

The sound was not so much distressed as it was totally hopeless. Once, when he'd been really little, Sam had trapped lightning bugs in a jar and when they'd got to their next motel they'd all been dead. He'd cried like this on that occasion and on no other that Dean could think of.

Dean had his arms around him before he was even conscious of moving. "Shh, shh, shh," he said, half to Sam, half to get a grip on his own panic. "You're okay, Sammy, you're okay."

Sam couldn't or wouldn't calm down. He didn't even seem to register Dean's presence, and that scared the shit out of Dean. He just carried on crying, the kind that physically hurt afterward. Dean had not the faintest fucking idea what to do.

Eventually Sam seemed to wear himself out, if not settle exactly. The sobs subsided into hiccups. Dean's shirt was stuck to his chest with snot and tears, and he didn't give a single shit.

Sam's hand caught in the jersey over Dean's chest, the first sign he'd given that he'd noticed Dean was there. Dean rocked them, trying to calm the rabbiting of his own heart.

"Why'd you run away, Sammy?" he whispered into his brother's hair.

Hiccups still jerked Sam's body periodically. "I told you why."

Dean rubbed circles in his back. "What d'you mean? When?"

"In my note."

Dean stiffened.

A moment ago, he would have forgiven the whole thing, no matter the reason, if only Sam would have told him. But this lie again.

He pushed Sam away and stood. "Why are you still lying?"

Sam shook his head, maybe in denial, but more like a dog with water in its ear. "I'm not."

"You know, what I don't get is why? Even if I was stupid enough to believe you, it wouldn't make up for what you put us through."

Sam glared up at him out of red-rubbery eyes. "You _are_ stupid, if you never found it."

He looked like the vulture, hunched up on the mattress down there. He looked disgusting, nose purple and lips slick, a toddler in a ten-year-old body. Pathetic. "Whatever your malfunction is, Sam, you might want to get it together. Unlike you, I actually have a life now. I have hunting to do. I have a girlfriend. Know what time my curfew is now? Three. In the morning. So get used to me not being here all the time to tuck you in and wipe your nose and entertain you, because I've got better things to do."

Sam stood up. He was shaking, hard, and yet Dean almost took a step backwards before he caught himself. "What difference is that going to make?" Sam said. "You're never here, anyway! Nobody is! Why do you even care that I ran away? You don't! You're just mad that I broke one of his stupid rules because _you're_ too scared to!"

Dean could barely untie his tongue for the rage. "You have no idea," he said. "No idea."

Once again he grabbed his bedding and went to go sleep somewhere that didn't have his brother in it. This time, at least, he had a door to slam between them.

All his other plans for the evening had had the appeal sucked right out of them, thanks, as ever, to Sam. A blast of wind hard enough to rock the trailer spattered rain across the living room window like castoff. Thirty seconds later, the water on the roof was a dull roar.

Phosphorescent white burst silently in the window. One-one thousand. Two-one thousand. Three-one thousand. Four. The crack rattled plates.

Dean tossed onto his other side. He was still seething, mind devouring itself with the kind of thoughts nobody but Sam could ever put there, but some other agitation coursed underneath it, too. He didn't have a name for it, but part of him thought: better out here. Better out here, between Sam and the door.

No gap came between the next flash and its bang. The power died with a soft whine. Dean punched his pillow into shape, twisted the blanket around his hips, and turned back over. If Sam was still crying in the other room, he couldn't hear it over the rain.

* * *

He didn't wake whenever Dad got back. The next time he opened his eyes was when the master bedroom door shut, though he thought maybe he'd been half awake already because the gray light seeping through the blinds felt old already. He twisted to look over the arm of the couch at his father, who stopped.

Dean was still in his clothes from the night before. Dad wasn't, yet somehow looked like he was. The power was back on, VCR clock blinking, but the A/C in this place was all wall units that had to be switched on manually and the air was motionless and already warming. The two oldest Winchesters looked at each other.

"All right, then, come on," said his father.

Dean took a second to piss and splash water on his face. As he came out of the bathroom, he hesitated in front of Sam's door. His door, too, of course, but right now it didn't feel like that.

The anger of the night before was inert, along with most of the rest of him until he could get a hold of some caffeine, but some of the uneasiness remained. He could still see Sam in the grip of his nightmare. Actually, he thought maybe he'd dreamed about it, though if so the dream was long gone. He hovered with his hand over the bedroom doorknob.

Suddenly the door opened and Dad came out, apparently having just checked on Sam himself. It wasn't really something Dad did at the age Sam was now.

Dean hesitated. "I think maybe Sammy's sick or something," he said.

"Yeah." Dad closed the door soundlessly. "He was a bit last night, but he's getting over it. Let him sleep."

Outside, storm debris littered the sand, but the sky itself was clear, only the hindquarters of clouds visible off in the west. It wasn't much after six o'clock, but Beulah County was the kind of place where anything that was open in the mornings at all opened extra-early on Sundays, not late. Dad pointed them at the diner down the road, and neither of them spoke another word except to order until they'd both made it through a cup of coffee and a ham biscuit.

Dean was struck by how rough Dad looked. Seldom could he recall his father actually showing signs of fatigue. Then again, he supposed he didn't look much better.

"What'd you find out?" Dad asked when their first biscuits were digesting and their second coffees were gradually restoring them to life.

"Not much so far," Dean admitted, bracing himself for interrogation.

But his father just nodded. "Well, it was a long shot, anyway."

"I could try again?" Dean offered.

Dad sighed, rubbing over his beard. "That's all right. I think I was chasing the wrong theory, anyway. But if you're not working and you're not training, you can go out with your friends. You've earned it."

"What about Sam?"

Dad smiled wryly. "Him, too." He waved a hand to show he hadn't misunderstood Dean's question. "I can't keep either of you on a leash forever. It was a mistake to try."

Dean was stunned into silence. He could probably make an itemized list of the times his father had admitted to having been wrong about something, if he tried. None of them had ever concerned him or Sam.

"I need your help with him," Dad said.

"Yeah, of course." It was an automatic answer.

"Just keep an eye out. Let me know if you see anything concerning."

"Concerning how?" Dean tried to keep frustration out of his voice. Dad was looking to him to be the advance warning if Sam showed any signs of running away again, but Dean didn't know what the signs were. There must have been some, but he'd missed them the first time. Yet his father expected him to see them the next, and his faith just made Dean feel more helpless.

"Just anything that doesn't sit right," said Dad. "Anything out of character, or dangerous."

"Okay," Dean said. He couldn't say anything else.

Part of him wanted to, though. In the run up to puberty, Dean himself had done a lot of shit that might have been classed as uncharacteristic and/or dangerous, and Sam had never ratted on him. They'd never ratted on each other. Of course, whatever they'd once been, Sam had already shat all over it and forfeited any expectation of privacy by being a backstabbing little bitch, but it still didn't sit right.

His conflict must have shown despite his efforts not to let it, because Dad said, "Remember that you're his brother, not his friend. He's a kid, you're not."

The words were as much freedom as they were responsibility. Dean didn't know why they made him feel so alone.

His father looked at him critically from across the table, and that, at least, was comfortingly familiar. "How many cigarettes?"

Dean narrowly avoided upsetting his coffee. "Sir?"

"I smoked in the Corps," Dad said. "Everybody did. I'll always know the smell. You reek. How many?"

"Not many," Dean muttered at his plate. He thought, but did not say: _You said I'm not a kid._ You _said. You_ just _said._

"Should I take that to mean you're not keeping count?"

"Two! Honestly."

Dad just looked at him, assessing. "Your mother made me quit. She didn't want her children brought up with it." Dean wanted to sink through the floor. "You've still got the day off work?"

"Yeah."

Dad eyeballed him a beat longer, then tossed a couple fives on the table and stood. "Come on."

"Where are we going?"

"Training. Might as well take advantage of the surroundings."

* * *

Dean broke the surface gasping.

Dad glanced at his stopwatch. "Seventy-three seconds," he said, unimpressed.

Dean would have cared more if he'd had enough oxygen in his brain to do it with. He hoisted himself onto the dock with his elbows and laid his cheek against the wood to catch his breath.

Dad promptly nudged him right off with the toe of his boot. "That was for baseline. Now we work."

Working consisted of sitting in warm, sparkling water on soft, white sand under a clear blue sky, while all around him families splashed in inner tubes and girls sunbathed in bikinis. The storm had left the air fresh and the clouds scant. He had the day off. He was getting to spend it in the body of water he'd spent the last week longing after. It was just his fucking luck that he'd be doing it with six inches of water over his head and his lungs on fire.

Gasping again.

"Eighty-one. Okay, lap, to the wake post and back. Three minutes."

Three minutes should have been ample time, and had been at the beginning of this, but not after the fifth, sixth, seventh round of starting it on starved and burning lungs. "You win," he told Dad when next he slapped the end of the dock.

"I'm sorry?"

"Smoking is bad. I get it. I'll never do it again, I swear."

Dean had an interesting view of his father from this angle. Boot toes foreshortened into beard, directly up nose, and then into impenetrable, unfathomable eyes. John Winchester regarded him.

Then he reached into his pocket and took out the car keys. He held them up, looked at them, looked at Dean. "These are your brother," he said.

Dean had no idea what the fuck, but his stomach plummeted anyway.

"A morgen has him. You can hold your breath for eighty-one seconds. How long do you think Sam can?"

"Dad, don't—"

Dad threw the keys into the lake.

Dean dove. His mind replayed where the keys had hit the water in Technicolor and Dolby Surround Sound; Dad hadn't thrown them that far. The search area wasn't huge. The water was clear, the bottom was clean. It wasn't impossible.

_These are your brother._

What the hell was the point of the mind games? The fucking _car keys_ were bad enough. That was their home, Jesus. Their home was somewhere at the bottom of this lake. Dean didn't need any extra motivation.

Scanning white sand for metal. Bursting up to the surface, sucking in a lungful, diving again. Sam writhing under the blanket last night, body arching unnaturally slow, like he'd been under water.

Dean swam and scanned, swam and scanned.

Shiny burst of silver on the white. The sound the keys made in his fist was muted in the water, felt more than heard, and then he was on the surface.

He floated on his back for a moment, keys digging into his palm. Dad hadn't ordered him to be back at the dock within any specific time limit. Dean blinked angry tears away into the rest of the water all over his face.

When he finally did slap the keys down at his father's feet, Dad bent down and picked them up without a word of praise or criticism. All he said was, "We're done for today. Take the afternoon. Enjoy the lake."

Dean swallowed, looking at his hands and the wet prints they left on the wood. Dad's boots rang on the boards down the length of the dock.

The whole lake was open to him, now; everywhere he heard the shrieks of children, buzzing boat motors, wake water slapping the bottoms of docks. A kid of about five staying at their motor court came pelting straight for the water, arms pumping with red plastic floats on them, his big sister laughing in pursuit. They cannonballed in a couple yards away from him, one after the other.

Dean breast stroked out to a cypress that sat all alone in a quiet stretch of lake behind that open-air chapel on the shore. The water was shallow here, but still deeper than most cypresses liked, up to his chest. He stared up at the tree. A breeze lifted Spanish moss on its branches.

Dean submerged. When his lungs started to burn and buoyancy kept trying to pull him up, he held himself under by the cypress roots, six inches of water over his head.

* * *

Hunger drove him in around one o'clock. Dad was gone again, and Dean supposed himself still at liberty. He could go right back out to the lake if he wanted, spend the afternoon burning himself to a crisp.

An amazing thought occurred to him, and he dialed Kristina. Like before, he got her mother. He passed the time waiting for her return call imagining what sort of bathing suit she might own.

Except it never came. Ten, fifteen, twenty minutes passed, and the phone on the wall stayed silent. Dean made another sandwich, and still nothing.

He ate at the kitchen counter, near the phone. He'd give it another five minutes.

The screen door skreeked open and Sam came through it. Dean had assumed he was in the bedroom. "Where were you?" Dean demanded.

Sam crossed to the fridge and hunted for something, frowning lightly when he didn't seem to find it. "I was at church."

"You were what?"

Sam shrugged. "Dad said I could go out. I went out."

Dean watched him pour OJ into one of those collector's Coke glasses. Dad had told him as much that very morning, though it seemed long ago now. "To _church?"_

"Uh-huh."

"Thought you were sick."

"I'm better now."

Sam was a bit flushed from being outside, but not unhealthily so. He put ice cubes in his juice and flipped on the TV. He seemed… happy, kind of.

Another five minutes. _M*A*S*H_ rerun grainy on the TV. Nothing from the phone.

The top of Sam's head was visible over the back of the couch, hair curly where his sweat had dried. He finished his OJ and turned off the TV again, like he hadn't really been watching in the first place, washed out his glass, and put it in the drying rack next to the sink. Sunlight through the little window caught it like the keys at the bottom of the lake.

"Listen, Sam. About last night."

Sam turned to face him. "It's okay, Dean."

Dean blinked. He was less taken aback by the words than by Sam himself. He was quiet. He'd been quiet since they'd got him back, but this was different quiet, peaceful quiet.

"You've got things to do, and so do I." Sam shrugged again. "It's okay."

He disappeared into the bedroom.

Dean tried Kristina again, got her mother again, and hung up without leaving a message. Eventually he wandered back out to the lake, but it wasn't as much fun as he'd pictured it, just swimming by himself.

* * *

Sam stayed like that. Outside of PT and dinner, Dean didn't even see him, practically. That wasn't really a change from before but for some reason it felt like one. The kitchen and bathroom, which had always been clean in accordance with Dad's chores lists, now actually sparkled.

It turned out that the rattling sound inside Kristina's Walkman was a spring. It had come off a little metal tongue when the casing separated along its seam, and now it was caught in the band that turned the tape reel. Dean crimped the end loop back into shape with a pair of nail clippers and popped the spring back on. When he pressed play, the thing worked fine.

Dean hit the lake a few more times, but most of the time he wasn't working he spent listening to Zeppelin II on repeat, wishing for somebody to play it to.

* * *

On Tuesday night, Kristina finally called. She was crying.

Naturally, Dean was alarmed. "What's wrong?"

"I had a fight with my dad," she told him. "I gotta get out of here. Can I meet you at the water tower?"

Dean went to the bedroom to retrieve the Walkman first. Sam was in there reading, no shit, the fucking Bible; he looked up at Dean's entry, and Dean shook his head in disbelief.

His father was similarly absorbed at the opposite end of the trailer, though presumably not with scripture. "I'm gonna meet a friend, is that okay?"

Dad glanced at his watch. "Don't you have work in the morning?"

"I'll get enough sleep," said Dean, hoping not to get any. "I thought I'd try to get more information about local lore."

His father only arched an eyebrow at him.

The water tower was old school, wearing a wooden platform around its middle like a tutu. He climbed the ladder and found Kristina swinging her feet on the edge of it, arms folded on the railing, chin resting on her arms. She stared off into the dark. Dean sat down next to her feeling inadequate.

Chicks dug sensitive guys, though, everybody knew that. "So what'd you guys fight about?"

Kristina sighed and retracted her legs onto the platform. She wasn't wearing any lipstick today. "Let's talk about something else."

Well, that was a relief. "What do you want to talk about?" Dean asked, right before she leaned over and kissed him.

His favorite topic.

They were definitely getting better at this; the plans Dean had had for a meeting of souls via Walkman were instantly forgotten. He found a rhythm faster, working his lips against hers, and fell away into a horizon of anticipation. It was something buzzing and warm, serene yet electric. It was, he was fairly sure, the best thing he had ever felt in his life.

Kristina was in some kinda mood, though, and it got to where she was half-biting his mouth. It was nice to be wanted, but Dean wasn't sure chewing was on his list of fantasies.

One of her hands found its way up under his shirt and she growled when he gasped, kneeing her way up and on top of him. Dean stared up at her slack-jawed. She grabbed his hands and put them on her breasts, and his brain shorted out. She wasn't wearing a bra. He didn't know a lot about women's underthings, but he knew that. He squeezed without any conscious will or control, and she kissed him harder.

He was just on the verge of _something amazing_ when abruptly she pulled back. "What, what is it?" he asked wildly.

He had a splinter in his scalp. He didn't know when he'd gotten it or in fact care.

"Dean, you said I can count on you."

"You can!"

"Prove it."

"How do you want me to do that?"

"I need your help with something."

"I can be helpful."

"I need someone who'll make my dreams come true," said Kristina.

This was starting to sound questionable, but Dean wasn't giving up yet. "Do you want, like… jewelry?" He'd seen a couple things in the Goldston's store he could swing. Cowrie shells had featured heavily.

But Kristina only looked at him in disdain. "No."

Well, he hoped she didn't want a car. "I can take you to the Ski Burger."

She paused. "Will you take me to the Putt-Putt?"

Gladly he would. It was only $2.50 to play all day, and they threw in a Sno-Cone.

So they climbed down from the water tower and walked to the Putt-Putt, about a half a mile. Dean's hard-on finally abated midway through the trip. Kristina chilled out a bit once he bought the tickets; a smile even broke through her face's defenses when he handed her her Sno-Cone. It was late enough the place wasn't too crowded, though this close to Fourth of July there'd be traffic here until the place closed at midnight.

Dean was an expert putt-putt player. Well, he was an expert pool player, at least, and putt-putt was pretty similar. Well, at least he was better at pool than most people. He made up complicated shots on each green and Kristina, who was "hopeless" at putt-putt, was awed at his prowess. Impressed, anyway. Pretty impressed. It wasn't like he could pull out a gun and start wasting ghosts in front of her, but he seemed to be making do with the mini-golf.

The statues were extra-ugly seen up close. Pastel rabbits, blue flamingos, cactuses in all colors but green. The patron of the tenth hole was a brontosaurus munching silk flowers with a blotto look on its face, while in the middle of the course, a yellow T. rex stretched stubby arms out to passersby entreatingly, appearing on the brink of tears. At the seventh hole, which due to the intestine nature of the course was next to the entrance, Dean looked up at the samurai caricature on its plinth and grinned, shaking his head. "Man, I can't believe the same guy as did these did the church stuff." He lined up again, bounced the ball a little too far, but banked it finally off a windmill lantern. Hole in three, not bad.

"That's sort of what my dream is," said Kristina, teeing up.

"Huh?"

She sank the ball in one stroke. "I want to show these Bible-thumping pussies," she announced at full volume.

Dean jumped. "Holy— Keep your voice down." Fortunately none of the Confederate flag types around them seemed to have heard, too absorbed in their putting and/or beer.

"Why? Are you chickenshit or something?"

Dean flushed in anger. "Hardly," he said.

"Are you too nutless to help me change the Jewel of Christ Jesus for that big, sad dinosaur over there?"

"Of course I'm not— Wait, what?"

Kristina stood tall, putter in hands, eyes blazing. "You heard me. I wanna put that dinosaur right where Jesus is preaching, and Jesus on the fourteenth hole."

"How in the hell are you going to do that?"

"Well, I thought you'd be able to contribute some ideas, but maybe I was wrong." She snatched her ball out of the cup and stalked off toward the next green.

Dean caught her by the sleeve. "Whoa, whoa, whoa!" He spun her to face him, which she did haughtily. "I never said I wouldn't do it."

She eyed him coolly. _"Can_ you do it?"

This chick didn't even know what was out there in the dark. She had no idea what Dean's lifetime of training had entailed or the things he'd killed with it. "I've done a lot bigger than move some lawn ornaments around, thanks."

"So you'll do it?"

Dean sneered. "I'll do it better."

Her face changed at that, eyes going soft and starry. "Oh!"

The clarity of the hunt descended on Dean. Kristina hung on his forearm, and her delicate grip made something powerful and confident swell within him. "We need to plan," he told her, "and I need to do some recon. Come on."

* * *

Since the $2.50 was play all day and the crowds were thinning, nobody cared when they started the round over. "We can't get the dinosaur," Dean confided as they played. "See that line at the bottom? Filled with concrete. No way we get it off the block without somebody seeing or hearing."

"What about the whale?" Kristina hissed.

"Even heavier. He's concreted on there all around his belly, look."

Kristina put another ball in another cup. Her playing seemed very competent all of a sudden. "Drinky Bird?" she asked hopefully of the Alice in Wonderland creature poised over the hole they were on.

Dean had been surreptitiously knocking on statues as they passed them to test their solidity and had a pretty good understanding of the battlefield conditions. "These things are all the same," he said. "Fiberglass shells filled with concrete at the bottom. We're not gonna be able to move a whole statue." Kristina whirled on him, opening her mouth to argue. _"But,_ we can move the heads."

Her stormy look morphed into one of delight. "That's even better! You can get the dinosaur's head, can't you?"

Dean eyed the grief-stricken T. rex. "Could get it off; the problem would be getting it to stay on the other body. This is going to have to be fast and clean. See the way his neck sticks out? It'd never work. We'd have to use, like, tackle to keep it on the statue at the church, or to get Jesus' head to stay on this one. But if the statues were about the same shape and size…." He trailed off.

Kristina followed his gaze up to the glowering samurai.

"Then we just pop the heads off and switch them," he finished.

Her eyes shone. "Dean," she said, a little breathless, "you're a genius."

* * *

He told her where to find Coleson's shed on NC-53 and she met him there at one a.m. The padlock was easy. Together they moved the pressure washer off the flatbed, and he helped himself to a tarp, bungee cords, rope, and a mallet and chisel.

"Here's how we do this," he told her as he hot-wired the flatbed. "We decapitate Jesus first, put Him under the tarp, take Him down to the Putt-Putt. I'll crack the head off the samurai, and then we gotta lower it down together. We can't drop that. If it falls, people in the trailer camp are gonna hear it, and we'll be screwed. It'll be heavy. Think you can do it?"

"The canoes at the FFA camp are all fiberglass," Kristina said. "I'm not weak."

"Okay. So first we put Jesus on the samurai, then we put the samurai on Jesus, then we take this thing"—Meaning the flatbed.—"out the opposite direction down Lakeview and around 701 back to here. Tomorrow, everybody wakes up and Jesus is watching the mini-golf, and nobody knows who did it or how."

In fact, Dean felt some anxiety about the "carting stolen property up and down the main thoroughfare in the back of more property stolen from his boss" part of this plan, but Kristina had kissed him behind the Sno-Cone stall and let him touch her nipples through her shirt, so he wasn't about to show weakness now.

Maybe there really was a God, though, because Kristina said, "We don't have to use Lakeview. There's a path behind that hedge that runs behind the Putt-Putt and the post office and everything. There's a blueberry farm back there. The path goes all the way out to Colly Creek Lane; it'll take us right behind the church. Then we can go the back way out to 701 and never have to be on the main road at all."

"Even better." He got the golf cart going and off they went.

It hit him as they trundled down the dark shoulder of NC-53 that this could be the greatest night of his life. He was about to prank some Bible-thumpers but good. He was going to impress the living daylights out of this girl. And—the thought dazzled his mind—he was, in all probability, going to have sex or at least something like it for the first time in the next twenty-four hours.

Dean thought in pictures, and he could see it. When their work here was done, Kristina would gaze up at it in awe. Then she would turn that same look on Dean.

"It's everything I dreamed," she'd say. "It's _better_ than I dreamed."

"I know," he'd tell her.

Then he'd take her in his arms, and— Wait, no, there'd be the flatbed to deal with first. Well, returning that would probably break the spell for a while, but from the shed back to the tower was only about a… four-mile walk, not too bad, and she hadn't complained about her shoes so far or anything.

Once back at the water tower, he'd take her in his arms, and— No, no, he almost forgot. Once there, he'd pull her Walkman out of his pocket. He'd look deeply into her eyes as he held the headset out to her. Trembling, she would take it. She would raise it to her ears.

"You fixed it?" she'd say. "That's impossible. Nobody could do that."

In answer, he would press play. "Don't Let Him Go" would hit her ears.

Her lips would part. Her pupils would dilate. _Then_ he'd take her in his arms, and—

"I can't believe this is really happening." The real girl's voice jarred him out of his thoughts. "It's going to be just like that Metallica song, the leper one. Everybody will have to look up at that statue and see how hypocritical and _stupid_ they are."

Dean, whose motives were less ideological, could only say, "Totally."

"They're gonna be madder than hornets with hemorrhoids," Kristina said happily.

Would Sam be mad? Sam, who'd been all lit up and peaceful and happy ever since he'd gotten religion and started reading the fucking Bible in their bedroom? Dean couldn't picture it. He didn't think Sam would laugh, either: once he would have, but that had been back when he was someone Dean still thought he knew.

No, Dean decided, not mad. When he ran the scenario in his head, what Sam was was humiliated, and frankly that was better.

The blueberry farm was apparently what sat behind the populous half of the town of Jewel Lake, being a plot stretching from NC-53 south of Lakeview to Colly Creek Lane half a mile east of Goldston's and the church. The path Kristina had talked about was a sandy access road that ran between the field and the hedgerow that, thick with honeysuckle and kudzu, screened the whole thing from sight of the handful of townsfolk and vacationers who were still out whooping it up, mostly by getting drunk and racing trucks up and down Lakeview. Kristina pointed out the breaks in the hedge that allowed access to the Putt-Putt, the fire station, a mini-mart, and, finally, to the field behind the church. The field was bounded by residences, both trailers and bungalows. These were all dark though: the residents here were not of the late-carousing kind. The flatbed ran silently (golf carts were good for one thing), and no one was awake to look out their window.

Decapitating their lord and savior went pretty smoothly. There were fiberglass cows and sheep around Him for them to stand on, and His pink, flowing-locked head made barely a sound as it kissed the sand at His feet. Less than a hundred yards away, on the other side of the street, Goldston's was still lit up and alive, but none of the people going in and out at the gate gave the church a second glance. Together, Dean and Kristina rolled the head up the ramp into the flatbed and slipped back behind the hedge.

Beheading the samurai was dicier. They had to carry a picnic table over from the neighboring Ski Burger to reach the head. It was also a lot closer to the road. A couple of times while getting things into position, they had to duck down to avoid either approaching headlights or voices on the sidewalk, and if that happened while they were actually moving one of the heads it was going to be all over. But their luck held.

They loaded and tarped the samurai's head. Then they placed Jesus', which was still bound in bungee cords and rope, on the picnic table. Sitting on the samurai's shoulders, Dean hoisted it up while Kristina made sure it didn't bang against the statue's body. He slotted it into place, removed the cords, and hopped down.

Together, they stared up at Jesus' benign if slightly stoned visage atop His new body. The Lord was a bit slimmer than the samurai, resulting in a pinhead effect.

Kristina clasped her hands. Her eyes were damp with a surprising amount of emotion. "This really is a dream come true. You have no idea. I wish…. Well, anyway. Thank you, Dean. You're a good guy."

He might not play any football, but mentally, Dean was doing a touchdown dance. "Come on, let's finish it."

Kristina rode in the back with the head as they traveled back to the church. In minutes, they were turning from the access path into the church backyard, cruising past the dark windows of the nearest bungalow like a submarine running on silent.

_Snick._

Dean started. "What was that?" he hissed.

"What was what?" Kristina hissed back.

"I heard something."

 _"I_ didn't hear anything."

The sound hadn't been loud, but it had been sharp, like a stone or a bit of shot meeting glass. Dean threw every sense hunting had honed in him outward, but nothing else met his ears. Anyway, he wasn't hunting now. The most dangerous thing out here was probably a drunk in a truck. He made himself relax.

They rounded the church and Dean brought the flatbed to a halt right behind Jesus' headless body. As before, they still had the head bound up in bungee cords, so all they had to do was hop up on the backs of the livestock flanking His white robe, haul it up by the rope attached, and place it on His shoulders. It settled into place with a light scrape. Dean tested its balance carefully: the holy neck stump held it secure. They unwrapped the tackle, dismounted, and inspected their work.

In the faint glow that reached them from Goldston's, the samurai glared upon the flock of lambs, oxen, dog-sized songbirds, and children round his feet with a bulbous eye full of malice. A dinner mint blue lamb nuzzled His robe about mid-thigh, looking for benediction or perhaps a lump of sugar. Under His left hand, a little girl in blond pigtails looked up adoringly from golfball eyes; His right He raised in a merciless curse upon them all.

Something was happening to Kristina. Her face was flushed. She was breathing harshly, almost as harshly as Samurai Jesus glared.

"Kristina? Are you okay?" Dean whispered.

She got a steely glint in her eye. "Kiss me, Dean. Right here. Right now."

As kinks went, this one seemed highly specific, but he wasn't about to say no.

She didn't give him much of a chance to, anyway. She grabbed his face and planted one on him right beneath Samurai Jesus and His cross. Within seconds, Dean was hard, and if she rubbed up against him one more time, he was pretty sure he was going to be born again.

In the midst of this religious experience, he heard the first yell.

He spun around. A man was sprinting toward them from behind the church in a bathrobe and boxers, his face a mask of fury that made the samurai look friendly.

He had a shotgun.

Dean reached for Kristina's hand to run when the sound of laughter bubbling out of her throat stopped him in his tracks. She planted her heels and stared the man down. He was close enough for Dean to recognize, now: Sam's youth group pastor.

"Hey, Daddy!" Kristina jeered. "Did we wake you?"

Pro: the pastor was so focused on Kristina he seemed to have forgotten to blow Dean's head off. Con: flecks of foam were flying from his mouth.

"Kristina Lee, get your butt back in the house right now!"

"Why don't you make me?"

"I will!" he bellowed.

"So you gonna let me go live with Aunt Katie yet?"

"Devil-girl! I'll let you go live in the county asylum!"

"Oh, but Daddy, don't you like my art project?"

For the first time, the pastor seemed to register the ways in which Jesus had changed. His jaw fell, and he _quaked,_ staring up at the thing in horror.

When finally he recovered his voice, he said, "Kristina Lee Davies, you're going to Hell!"

She shrieked with laughter. "Hey, Daddy!" She flung her arms around Jesus' midriff and humped it with about twice the enthusiasm she'd spared for her accomplice. "Jesus lo-oves me!" She jerked a thumb at Dean. "But not as much as _he_ did!"

The pastor whipped around.

"Uh," said Dean.

They stared at each other for a moment like saltwater taffy: elastic and sticky.

Dean made a break for it.

He was halfway across the lawn before the first shotgun blast exploded the sand near his feet. He put on a burst of speed, and the second shot went wild into the church sign:

_A 4-IN T___UE CAN BRI_G A _-FT M__ 2 HIS K___S_

Behind him, the pastor swore the swear of a man out of ammo. Kristina tittered.

Dean had youth and physical conditioning on his side, but the pastor was a tall man, long of limb, and judging by the haircut, possibly ex-military himself. Some of his head start Dean had had to spend on defensive maneuvers. The pastor was gaining.

Dean burst into the street. Goldston's was open later than anything in the whole 887 square miles of Beulah County during the season. The Fourth of July was this weekend. It wasn't packed at this hour, but there was traffic.

Dean vaulted over the car parked in the gate to pay its exit ticket and pounded over the parking lot.

There wasn't enough cover. The gate attendant would be looking for him, and the people waiting to ride the ferris wheel or the tilt-a-whirl at this hour were a desultory few. All the prize booths and shooting galleries shut down at midnight, and it had to be closing in on two a.m. by now. Dean made for the arcade.

As he drew level with the bumper cars pavilion, he slowed to a nonchalant stroll. None of the patrons—couples, mostly, and knots of kids in their twenties—spared him a second glance.

In the comforting dimness of the arcade, he hunkered down between the Formica wings of a Baby Pac-Man in a corner. Games beeped and dinged from distant quarters, and neon lights painted the cigarette fug in shades of violet, orange, and green. Dean clutched the sides of his console and stared into its blank screen, trying to think.

He could really use a second pair of eyes right now. Someone who knew his way around an arcade as well as he did, someone small enough to wriggle through that one gap in the perimeter fence posts and make a distraction, maybe.

Forget that. All he had was himself. It looked like that was all he'd had from the start.

 _"Devil-girl_ is right," he hissed at the joystick.

Okay. All right. This was doable. The arcade was labyrinthine, hard to see in, and even half-empty, loud. He could stay hidden in here until it closed in—he checked the wall clock—less than an hour. Then—then—well, there'd been lots of pickup trucks in the parking lot. One of them had to have something in the back he could hide under. Yes. He could stow away in a truck and jump out when he was clear. Hell, if the vehicle turned west onto Lakeview, it'd probably take him right to his own door. There was the matter of the flatbed and the tools Dean had liberated for this little adventure, and the question of how to return them without getting shot or arrested, but he pushed all of that to one side for now. First, survival. Everything else could wait.

There again, the pastor had been in his bathrobe. And barefoot. There was no guarantee that he had followed Dean in here at all, or that he hadn't at least gone home to put clothes on and beat his daughter first. 

"Don, check down there."

Dean jerked his head up. In the same moment, a very large man with a crew cut looked down the aisle toward the Baby Pac-Man. Their eyes met.

"Hey!"

Dean had chosen this corner for its multiple escape routes as much as the undesirability of the game. He fled down the aisle perpendicular to Crew Cut Guy's path of pursuit and turned right into a corridor lined with Ataris and classic pinballs.

He might not know much about this particular arcade, since Kristina hadn't wanted to visit it on Saturday, but he'd killed time and occasionally evaded security in a hundred more like it across America. In here, they were on Dean's turf. He knew exactly where he was. Windows set high in the wall on his left were painted black to keep the place dark even during the day. He reached the end of the corridor. He turned left. He burst through the fire exit that would let him out into the parking lot—

—and caught himself on the railing of the stairs that led not to the parking lot, but the plaza in front of the pier, looking down into the youth pastor's eyes.

They did not speak. What passed between them was beyond words.

On Dean's right, Goldston's Pier stretched off into the darkness of the lake. On his left lay the parking lot and the only gate. The lake was closer. Dean broke for the pier.

It was half past two in the morning. The jet skis and paddleboats were moored. All along the pier beneath its soft, golden lights, couples held hands with their feet in the water, leaned close to murmur the thoughts of their hearts, and necked avidly. Dean pelted straight down it, aimed himself like a javelin between the couple leaving about thirty-six inches for Jesus at the end, and dove. The guy screamed when the splash hit him.

Dean surfaced fifteen yards out. The pastor had replaced the couple, shouting some downright unchristian things across the gulf.

"She wasn't even that good, Preacher!" Dean shouted back recklessly.

The reply shattered into incoherence against docks and buildings and water.

Dean laughed, buoyant with a high familiar from half a dozen other brushes with death. True, his summer job was now toast. So too, most likely, was his own backside when his father found out. But it was barely half the distance back to the trailer over water than it would be over land, and all he had to do was paddle home. He toed off his sneakers, turned a lazy flip in the water, and dolphin-kicked a wave at the Goldston's Pier.

Halfway to the wake zone posts, he flipped onto his back and floated, making a lakewater fountain at the sky with his mouth. The stars were beautiful. It was a new moon. Tiny bits of heavenly fire sparkled on the water all around him. Women: who needed them?

A jet ski engine started.

"Oh, shit—"

On open water, he'd be fucked. Dean swam frantically for the shore line. He glanced behind himself at the angry wasp-sound of the jet ski, made a decision, and dove.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven.

He made it to ninety-two before the pressure in his chest forced him to either surface or inhale water. Gasping, he looked around.

The nearest dock was barely ten yards away. Behind him, the sound of the jet ski changed direction. He took one more glance at the layout and one more deep breath.

It wasn't too long before his hand connected with an algae-slick post. Under the dock, he surfaced again; water slapped crazily at the boards from the jet ski wake. He couldn't stop here, he knew. Even in the dark it wouldn't be hard to figure out where he'd gone. 

This close in, the lake was shallow: not much space for Dean to maneuver, but not much for the pastor's jet ski, either. The distance between docks varied, but was probably something like thirty yards on average. He needed to clear that space before the pastor cut him off. He dove again.

And again, after another deep breath beneath the undercarriage of a dock that draped him with dead algae like a veil. Jewel Lake didn't grow much in the way of slime, but every bit it did collected under its docks. Both underwater and under wood, Dean could hear the jet ski skimming back and forth.

"Come out of there, you son of a—"

They went on like this, Dean leap-frogging from dock to dock, the pastor roving up and down seeking whom he might devour. Occasionally the latter would gun it down the inlet between docks as far as the shallows would allow trying to catch Dean, but he could no longer be certain which dock Dean was under, and even when he guessed right, his patrols never lasted more than a minute before impatience spurred him onward.

Dean was a pretty good runner, but swimming full-tilt was a completely different workout and they'd been at this for a while now. When he came up under a dock with a bit more headroom than usual, he hooked an arm over a brace beam and rested. He'd wait the pastor out here, he decided. The guy probably didn't even know where Dean was staying. He hadn't had the shotgun when Dean saw him in Goldston's, and the jet ski would run out of gas eventually. Dean scooped wet hair and slime out of his face and let himself catch his breath. A radio played the Beach Boys somewhere over his head.

Voices and laughter filtered down, subdued by the lateness of the hour. A can knocked against wood and liquid tinkled into the black chop, carrying the smell of cheap beer. A cigarette butt dropped through the planks and bounced off of Dean, singeing him.

"Rude," he muttered.

The pastor buzzed up and down outside for a few minutes but eventually approached with purpose. Well, let him. It wasn't like Bill Graham was going to be able to see under here unless he got off his jet ski with a waterproof flashlight.

"Excuse me," came the pastor's voice, "can you have a look under your dock for a young man?"

Sound of rednecks conferring. "What'd he do?" called the one sitting right over Dean's head.

"Vandalized church property, blasphemed against God, and took liberties with my daughter."

"Liberties with your daughter?" said a second redneck doubtfully.

"Pretty sure he's Jewish," said the pastor.

"Oh, well, hell," said the first redneck, and aluminum lawn chairs started to move.

Yet again, Dean dove. He clung to a post under the water with everything he had trying to stay submerged, but the wood was wrapped in a thick film of algae and boat motor oil, and his count barely made it to fifteen before he began to slide inexorably upward.

He broke the surface looking directly into an eye framed by a knothole. "Got 'im," said the first redneck placidly.

Dean swam furiously beneath the water, skimming belly-first over the sand and counting again in his mind. The need for air rose up faster each time, and still he and the pastor played this shell game.

Except it wasn't even a shell game. In a shell game, one at least moved the cups. This was a linear progression that, though it would take a while, must eventually lead his adversary straight to his own door. Dean surfaced under a particularly decrepit dock, colliding headfirst with a broken plank. He just barely managed to bite back his yelp.

The jet ski buzzed toward him, hovered, moved on to the next dock, repeated the process, returned. "The longer you wait, the worse it is, son," called the pastor, addressing a wide field.

Dean inspected the chunk of wood that had nearly brained him. It hung down like a dagger from a single bent nail and was about eight inches by five by three. Quietly, he worked it free of the nail.

This dock had two boat slips, one of which was occupied by a giant inflatable octopus. The float provided cover while Dean poked his head up into the empty slip, wound up, and threw the piece of wood as hard as he could.

It hit a duck, which erupted into the air with half a dozen of its kindred and furious quacks. "Ah- _ha!"_ the preacher shouted in triumph. "Think you can double back on me?" He revved the jet ski and roared off after the ducks.

"Hope they crap on you," Dean muttered.

It wasn't too much farther on to the motor court their trailer belonged to, but he made himself dock-hop the rest of it just in case. He could feel unspeakable things adhering to his skin under his shirt and to his privates. There was no sound of the pastor and, after a while, no sound at all save for the gentle lapping of the water.

The dock that marked home was easy to spot thanks to being the last one before the long void left by the field with the chapel. Dean crawl-stroked the last leg, free of pursuit at last.

He hadn't noticed the drag of his wet clothes during the adrenaline rush of the chase, but he noticed it now, and they felt like they weighed a ton. What time it was he couldn't even guess. Exhausted, Dean made the end of the dock the center of his existence until finally he reached out and met wood. He levered himself halfway up onto it with rubbery arms and algae in his hair and looked up into the face of John Winchester.

His father did not offer him a hand up. After a long consideration of his oldest son's appearance, he asked, "Black, boy, or preacher's daughter?"

Dean would have wondered what his father was doing out here, but apparently God just liked to fuck with him. "Preacher's daughter," he said.

Dad nodded. "Told you." He turned and headed back toward the trailer.

Dean hauled himself the rest of the way up onto the dock, leaving a trail of sludge in his wake. For the second time tonight, he lay on his back and stared up at the stars. "Yeah," he told them. "You did."

* * *

The front door was open. Dean left a wet trail from it to the bathroom, where he shucked his clothes. His shirt came away from his body with a sucking sound; his jeans, when he dropped them, made a _clunk._

He reached down and worked free the lump in one of the pockets. Water ran out of the Walkman when he turned it over, and more when he popped the tape compartment. The writing on the masking tape label of the mixtape had bled past any hope of decipherability—not that he needed the label to remember what was on it.

Dean felt a rush of humiliation. It wasn't just the songs he'd put on here, though he could picture his father's incredulity if ever he heard some of these. It was that he'd meant them. He'd wanted to get laid, sure, but he'd actually thought they'd had something. He'd thought that their lack of responsibility to each other made it safe to have something in the first place, and look how that had turned out.

As he showered, he made a rule for himself: girls were fine for fun; anything else was a disaster waiting to happen.

Afterward, with his lakewater-sodden clothes dripping into the tub, he brushed his teeth in front of the cloudy mirror. In addition to the standing army of whiteheads barracked around his nose and chin, he had a red mark on his temple from where he'd come up under one of the docks too quickly. Otherwise, outwardly, he was unchanged. He wasn't sure whether that pleased or disappointed him.

He opened and shut the door to their shared bedroom as quietly as he could, but Sam still stirred when the latch caught. The bedclothes rustled, and Sam looked over his shoulder at him. Dean waited for him to speak, but he said nothing. Didn't ask where Dean had been, what was going on, why he'd got in just now. After a minute, he just laid back down and pulled the covers back up again. Dean swallowed. And why would Sam ask? Wasn't like Dean had given him any reason to, lately.

He dressed in the dark and sat watching the lump on the next mattress by the light through the blinds. Sam's breaths had long since evened out again, and his bony shoulder rose and fell under his sleep shirt, the only part of him visible other than his hair. Dean could still feel that shoulder in his gut out on the bridge of the ATV track, wedged there by the force of his own weight.

He wasn't sure how to reconcile the kid who'd ditched him in a patch of nowhere with the one who'd carried him till he broke and then got up to do it again. He wasn't sure which one hurt him worse, and he wasn't sure which one he wanted to hurt back more.

Not that he even knew how to, really.

Sam kept breathing on the next bed, unreachable through the thin layer of the blanket, and Dean wondered when that had happened. When Sam had started going to church and reading the Bible? When they'd got him back from Flagstaff? Well, it must have been before, or they wouldn't have lost him in the first place.

Dean twiddled the ruined mixtape between his fingers. After long minutes, he leaned across the aisle and eased it between Sam's mattress and box springs, far enough back it wouldn't get pulled out if Sam changed the sheets. This motel didn't seem like the type to rotate its mattresses regularly, so it might well stay there undiscovered until the end of time. Then he lay down, curled up on his side, and closed his eyes, gripping the edge of his mattress to keep his arm from reaching into the space between the beds.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * Title from Arcade Fire's "Intervention." I almost called this _Three Religious Experiences in North Carolina,_ but I felt like it probably wouldn't be funny to anybody other than me.  
> 
> * Originally, I had John training Dean in the lake just because the lake was right there and John Winchester exploits what's to hand. Then I read [caranfindel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/caranfindel/pseuds/caranfindel)'s marvelous [Flies in the Vaseline](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24148843) and realized a much more natural impetus was sitting right there. I explained the change I wanted to make to this story and basically asked caranfindel's permission to lift the smoking motivation from _their_ story, which they kindly granted. Caranfindel had posted "Flies" as giftfic for me [in response to a Tumblr post of mine ages ago](https://caranfindel.tumblr.com/post/183387943812/the-most-unrealistic-part-of-supernatural-is-that), so now the circle of fannish cross-pollination is complete.  
> 
> * It's probably obvious that most of this is based on real locations, and yes, I visited the town for which Jewel Lake is a stand-in in the early 1990s and spent quite a bit more time around there later on as an adult. Some things about it are made up, but probably very few of the bits that seem most like they have to be.  
> 
> * This was supposed to be my 2020 Gencest Bang fic, which is how I learned that I cannot handle bangs. I'm still sad about it.


	2. John

**_May 22nd, 1993_ **

"Have you seen this boy?"

The trucker peered at the flyer, grunted, and shook his head. He moved off.

John repeated the procedure on the next person he found in the parking lot. The flyer was mocked up to look like a law enforcement circular for a missing child; it was easy to forge and helped to get people's attention. The truckers and drifters focused more, looked a little longer. But none of them had seen a ten-year-old boy with overlong hair and nothing to his name.

"Let me see that?"

John turned. The speaker was around thirty, with dark hair, dark eyeliner, and a jean skirt. The bright sunlight treated her makeup harshly. He held out the flyer. She took it, studied it, looked back up at him. "I'll be damned."

His pulse leapt. "You have seen him."

"Yeah." The lot lizard handed the paper back. "Red Eye truck stop on I-40. He came through just before that psycho axe murder."

Instinctively John checked the side mirror of the rig they stood beside, seeking out his car and Dean's outline in the passenger seat. Safe. "What?"

"You didn't hear about that? It was just a couple days ago. Some guy got cut up in the bathroom, horrific Satanist shit or something. That's why I, uh, decided to start getting coffee someplace else."

The parking lot dimmed at the corners like a singed photograph. Habit spoke through John like he was a puppet. "No. We didn't hear about that."

"Well, sorry to be the one to tell you." She fiddled with the strap of her pocketbook, which was dulled metallic leather. "It definitely wasn't the kid who bought it, though. I heard it was a trucker. An adult, anyway, that much I know. Look, sorry, I gotta get going. I hope you find him."

"Thank you for your time."

* * *

There were no cop cars at the Red Eye Gas Plaza and Diner in Tucumcari. There was no yellow crime scene tape blocking it off. Mitchell Brown had died there two and a half days ago, but America still needed trucks, and truck drivers still needed diesel and caffeine and a place to relieve themselves.

"Look, are you guys finished with it or not?" said the Red Eye's owner. Sorting through keys outside the men's room, he tipped his head toward the next door, where a paper sign taped over the _LADIES_ placard read _UNISEX_ instead. "Running two lanes of traffic on a one-lane bridge isn't really doing it for my waitresses, you know what I mean?"

"The office'll let you know when you can reopen the scene to the public," John told him. He watched the man's fingers and fantasized about smashing an elbow into his face and taking the keys.

Dean was stashed at a Motel 6 thirty miles back. John had told him not to leave the room, open the blinds, or answer any knocks. He was reasonably certain his oldest wouldn't put a toe out of line. Not with the way he'd nodded frantically up at John in the room's half-light, fear and despair under his pallor. Dean had worn that look a lot, since he'd called John back to Goodnight, Texas.

The men's room wasn't sealed with crime scene tape. When he'd seen that upon first walking in here, John had feared he was too late until he'd tried it and found it locked. Apparently management had thought tape would just attract attention, and law enforcement had agreed. Perhaps it was because of that absence of a visual marker that the owner felt the need to warn him, when he finally found the right key, "It's bad in there."

It was bad.

The men's room was tiled in off-white and yellow. There were two stalls, both grayish beige. One was closed. One was open.

John turned to the owner. "Do you mind?"

"I really _don't,"_ the man said fervidly, and left.

John looked at the open stall. It was coated. Dried, the blood ranged in color from a rusty orange where it was spread thin over the tile to dark brown where it was thicker and almost black along the grout. Various arcs, smears, and spatters exploded outward from the toilet; the reddest streaks were the ones that had dripped down the bowl, brightened by the porcelain beneath. A single handprint showed on the side wall over the toilet paper dispenser. The smell had been dulled by the blood's drying.

He swallowed as he took a step into the room, mindful of disturbing evidence on the floor. There really wasn't any, though. All of the blood was contained in the toilet cubicle, suggesting the killer had stood inside with his victim, but there were no footprints or droplets or brush transfers anywhere else. All of the shoe imprints in the stall itself were at the base of the toilet facing the door, where the victim had drummed his feet on the tile as he died. The handprint also looked to be his, smeared where he'd fallen against the wall. All that indicated the presence of a second person at all, aside from the fact and manner of death, was a void in the arterial jets painted over the door.

There could be an explanation for that. Possibly the killer came prepared in some way, took measures to conceal his exit. This could still be a coincidence.

The stall had been locked from the inside when the man was discovered, the owner had said. John stepped into the cubicle, pulled the door shut, and locked it. The lock was a slide bolt, but it was sticky. He inspected it, sliding the bolt forward and then back. Something sifted down to the floor.

He crouched to look, but it was too hard to see whatever it was among everything else on the tile. He tore off a square of TP, held it under the lock, and slid the bolt back and forth a couple times more. Yellow powder fell onto the paper. Carefully, he brought it to his nose and sniffed.

Sulfur.

No longer concerned about preserving the crime scene, John washed his face at the sink until his hands stopped shaking. He had to think. More importantly, he had to work. He had to work this like he'd never worked anything before. This thing was out there, and Sam was out there with it.

Back in the dining room, he took a seat at the counter and discreetly flashed his badge at the waitress. She came over, coffee pot at the ready, but he shook his head and reached into his jacket for the flyer. "Have you seen this boy? He would have come through the same day as the crime."

The waitress was maybe in her late twenties, pretty but with that hardness that suggested her youth had not exactly been roses. She looked at Sam's picture, returned the coffee to its burner, and turned back to him deliberately. "Yeah, he did." Her tone and expression were reserved. "He sat up here."

John swapped the flyer for a steno pad. "How did he appear?"

"Through the door, just like everybody."

"How was his appearance, I mean."

"All right, I guess. I could tell he was keeping an eye out, but not especially afraid or anything. Seemed kind of happy, actually."

"Did he speak to anybody?"

"Spoke to a few people, yeah. Truckers, mostly."

"He mention anything about where he was heading?"

"Just said he was headed west. His story changed depending on who he was talking to. Told one guy he had family there; told another one he was trying to get away from them. Guess it wasn't his first time shopping for a ride. Seen my share of runaways."

"You ever think to mention any of them to the police?"

"Used to." She eyeballed him in a way that made him think his badge was not a mark in his favor. "But all told, I've found that if they're running, usually they've got a reason."

Fury coursed through John. "This boy is ten years old. And his family is terrified."

"I'm sorry to hear that, I am. He said he was thirteen though, and yeah, he looked small, but when I looked him in the eye I believed him."

John had no time, no patience, no coping for this level of self-righteous stupidity. "These truckers," he said. "Did he convince any of them to give him a ride?"

She hesitated. "No, not exactly. But a guy was sitting down at the end"—She pointed.—"and after the other drivers shot him down, he came over and asked where the kid was heading. Said he could take him all the way to LA."

"Please describe him."

She shrugged. The movement was curiously young, coltish. "That was the guy who got murdered. He and the kid hashed it out, then he went to the bathroom. Kid waited for him to come out, but then somebody found the body and the ruckus started, so the kid took off. I saw him run out the door, but I don't know where he went after that. He didn't run because he had anything to do with it; just… there was a commotion and he decided to be elsewhere, you know? Some kids learn to do that early on."

"Yeah," said John, taking out his wallet and nodding at the to-go cups. "Some kids do."

* * *

Before he went to the morgue, John warded the hell out of the motel room. He'd have preferred not to frighten Dean—fear could be useful, but right now there was nowhere for that fear to go—but he didn't have a lot of choice. He put down salt, cat's eye shells, nazars. A few odds and ends he was careful to keep hidden. Dean watched with huge eyes.

"It's just a precaution," John told him. "We're in skinwalker country."

Dean looked doubtful, but he didn't talk back or ask what was going on. He hadn't done a whit of that since the night he'd told John Sam was missing. As he changed into dress clothes, John didn't tell him that he was going to a morgue. The boy knew too much about what a suit and tie meant as it was.

The Quay County medical examiner was berthed at the state university, and the sheriff met John there. Handshakes were exchanged and John explained his presence, something flimsy about a similar truck stop killing years prior. The sheriff didn't seem to care overmuch. "Brought the crime scene photos like you asked," he said, handing over a manila file.

The ME pulled open a drawer for them. "Mitchell Brown, 54." The body was purple-gray with an average build for a middle-aged trucker. His face was composed in death, indifferent to the crazy quilt of sutures keeping what remained of his generous abdomen shut. His throat and genitals were missing.

Outwardly, John didn't let his face flicker. Inwardly, his bowels turned to water. He'd seen corpses in worse objective condition than this, but none of them had been left behind by something chasing his youngest son somewhere.

_Sammy. Oh, God, Sammy._

He opened the manila file and looked from the photos to the body and back. What he saw in the photos fit with what he saw on the slab. He could read nothing else from the combination whatsoever.

John handed the folder back to the sheriff. "Weapon?"

"Knife, we're assuming, but we haven't found it yet." Raw edges like that were not made by a blade. "Your prior look anything like this?"

"No."

"Well, I'm not surprised. Pretty sure we know what happened to this guy."

"Wait, you do?"

Now the sheriff looked grim, and it occurred to John that all things considered, the man had taken the body itself in stride. "Mitch here? Got a rap sheet. Child porn." His lip curled in an expression as much of anger as of revulsion. "When we found him, we had a look around his rig. We found Polaroids. And we found a cage. One of those big wire dog kennels, and he didn't have a dog."

"I don't understand." John didn't. He wasn't having any trouble with the words coming out of the sheriff's mouth, but he didn't understand a thing.

"No prints, no weapon, no leads, but my guess is, the father of whoever's in those Polaroids caught up with him." The sheriff nodded at Brown. "Grisly, but if somebody took those kinds of pictures of my kids? Yeah. I'd be capable of that."

John looked at the body and swallowed back his gorge, this time for an entirely different reason.

* * *

From a phone booth beside the I-40, he called Jim Murphy.

He outlined the situation: Sam, out there in the world alone, and what was in the men's room of his last known location. He left out Mitchell Brown's hobby and the fact that Sam might have been the last person to see or speak to him alive. Jim got real quiet at the mention of the sulfur.

"You're sure?"

"I didn't take it to a lab, or anything, but yeah, I'm sure."

After a moment, Jim said, "Better check for storms. Crop deaths and cattle mutilations, too."

The phone's casing creaked in John's grip. "How the hell am I supposed to check for _cattle mutilations,_ Jim, they don't exactly post those in the society papers."

"No," Jim said, "but they talk about them down at the feed store. And weather's always easy. These things are slippery, but they can be tracked. Look for patterns."

So John hung up and bought every paper he could find in a twenty mile radius from the Red Eye. Then he went back to the Motel 6 and checked all his protections again. Salt was good but better used as a barrier than just tossed around, Jim had advised him, so John poured Morton in neat lines across the threshold and windowsills.

Dean was on the bed he'd have been sharing with Sam if Sam hadn't been missing, arms around his knees. His eyes had circles under them no fourteen-year-old's should. He struggled with himself visibly, afraid to speak up after the dressing-down he'd received when John had gotten home four days ago, but finally asked in a cracking voice, "Dad?"

John shook his head. "Nothing yet."

Dean swallowed as he looked away.

John laid out the newspapers as best the tiny table would permit, sorting them by degree of local relevance. Ordinarily, he might have used the wall, clipping and taping and labeling: it helped him to see the information organized that way, helped him more to go through the physical process of organizing it. But Dean didn't know they were looking for anything other than his brother, so John fell back on the discreeter methods he'd used back before Sammy had found out his dad wasn't a traveling salesman.

He did his best to put Dean out of his mind. He didn't have a choice; he had to focus. In minutes he was absorbed in notices of livestock auctions and tractors for sale, and he started when Dean's tentative voice broke in: "I've been watching the news. In case something— Just in case."

Knee-jerk irritation at the interruption nearly made John snap, but he was brought up short when he clocked what Dean had just said. Monitoring the news while John was running down leads: that was exactly the right thing to do. It was exactly what he should have told Dean to do, but hadn't. It had never even crossed his mind. Jesus fucking Christ, what was wrong with him?

"Anything?" he asked when he trusted his voice.

"I don't think so. I mean, definitely nothing about Sammy, or any kids. That's—that's kind of good news, right? If something had happened to a kid, there'd be something, right?"

Dean's voice strangled itself at the end. He already knew John didn't want to hear this kind of talk, that he only wanted to hear things they could act on, but it seemed Dean couldn't help circling back to this, like all kinds of pictures and headlines weren't drenching John's mind already every time he let his focus be drawn off the job at hand. But Dean was fourteen; focus wasn't his forte. He could manage some when he had something physical to do, but coop him up inside and of course he was going to sit around thinking about worst case scenarios.

"Probably," John said. "Tell me all the local stories anyway."

Reciting the information seemed to ground Dean some. The media were making hay with the dead trucker, but John told Dean he didn't think Sam had been near there. That seemed to help him. Other stories were banal: zoning debates, pushback against EPA regulations, road maintenance, a local church choir going to sing in Washington, D.C. Nothing, in other words.

"I might need to talk to some farmers," John said. That was true; farmers would sometimes give rides in the backs of their trucks to hitchhikers over quite long distances of back roads, so John would've had to question them even if he wasn't looking for a bunch of dead cows. "Any farming gossip I can maybe use?"

Dean chewed his lip, staring at the wall as he recalled hours of footage. "Not really," he said. "There was a bunch of bad meat at some supermarkets, but they said the refrigerators must've busted."

Something prickled at the back of John's head, but all he said was, "All right. Fine. Do indoor PT and catch some sleep while you've got a bed."

Dean looked at the newspapers and opened his mouth, like maybe he was going to ask to help, but after a moment's hesitation, all he said was, "Yessir."

John found the food spoilages in two of the local papers. It wasn't just meat; three grocery stores in the county had suffered losses of meat, dairy, and at one store even produce. Households had, too. No power loss accounted for it. The spoilages had occurred two days ago, right around when Mitchell Brown had been dropping his intestines onto his shoes.

Weather was inconclusive. There'd been local storms, sure, but it was summer and none of them had been exactly Biblical, just some dry lightning. They did seem to travel west along the I-40 corridor, but that was what storm fronts did.

John tried to think. He looked at page six of the _Gazette_ and let his eyes go unfocused as his mind worked. When he did this, all the random patterns formed by the spacing of the text came out, clumps of black emerging between runnels of white space. It was like watching clouds. Sometimes the page suggested the shapes of countries or states, sometimes a landscape, sometimes it just looked like paint crackle. From the newspaper's patterns-that-weren't, he could almost make out a face looking back at him.

* * *

Three hours later they were back on the road, working their way down I-40. Every day, John showed Sam's picture at every likely spot west of the Red Eye while Dean slept in the backseat or showed his own wallet picture around. It took time. But the time had to be taken, because if Sam had gotten off the interstate at some point, he could be anywhere.

But it seemed Sam hadn't. John was able to get solid _yes_ es to _maybe_ s for three hundred miles straight down I-40. The leads dried up just past Flagstaff, Arizona. He checked north- and southbound routes out of the city and got nothing.

Sammy was in Flagstaff.

He'd started east of Amarillo. At the final gas station he checked, John sat with that for a full five minutes before he turned the key in the ignition.

Even once he knew the city, though, it still took another two days. John tried to think like a ten-year-old with no connections and no bank account. He visited community centers, libraries, soup kitchens, grocers with bad security. He tried arcades and McDonald's and parks: _Have you seen this boy?_ No one had.

Finally John cleared all his notes off the table and just stared at the map of the city, thinking. He'd been looking for places Sam might have been seen. Perhaps he should have been looking for places he could remain unseen.

Flagstaff had upward of a dozen vacation rental places open only in ski season. Five of them were upscale; they didn't employ guards, it turned out, but all of them looked like they could. Most others were solidly middle-class in amenities and appeal. Three were much more basic, pretty much just trailer camps. One of these was walking distance from a convenience store and a pizza parlor.

Once he knew which property Sam was probably on and had a map of it courtesy of the unmanned kiosk at the front gate, it wasn't hard to figure out which specific trailer Sam would choose to hole up in. John just had to look for the one he'd have picked himself.

Even now he did not tell Dean, _Sammy's fine. When I find him he's going to wish mankind had never invented belts, but he just ran away like thousands of other kids and that's all._ He had to see it for himself first and know it was the truth. Everything else, they could deal with later.

Sam was staying in a 1970s flat-roofed single-wide at the end of a dusty hillside track. John left Dean in the car and circled around to the back of the place, not hiding his approach but keeping an ear and an eye out. Milk crates stacked under a back window confirmed he'd guessed correctly. He had to stop and just look at that for a minute: milk crates under a window.

John let himself in by the same route.

He moved quietly just in case, but all he found was a familiar backpack in a bedroom, pizza boxes in the living room, and, on the sofa, Sam dead asleep in front of an episode of _Tom and Jerry._ He had a Golden Retriever laying on him, big as life.

The dog roused before Sam did, and it was that, not the B&E, that actually woke him. The dog jumped up and started barking. Sam sat bolt upright and looked at John, and all the color ran out of his face.

John felt like a spectator in his own life, a passenger in his own body. The dog kept barking and he stared at Sam and Sam stared at him and John could not have said what he felt for love or money. He heard himself say, "Your brother's outside in the car. Go get your bag. We're leaving."

The dog did not shut up at any point.

"What about Bones?" Sam asked.

"Who?"

"Bones. Bonesy!"

It took John a minute to clock that Sam meant the Golden Retriever. "It's not coming."

Sam was upright now and, as Dean would say, freaking the hell out. "We can't leave Bones! We can't!"

"We'll call animal control when we get to town," John told him.

He'd been wrong a moment ago. _Now_ Sam was freaking out. "No! No, no, no, we can't, they'll put him down, they'll—" He had his skinny arms around the dog's neck; it still stood between him and John, and it was still barking its head off.

"You should have thought of that before," John said.

Whereupon Sam tried to make a break for it out the back door with the dog, urging it desperately, "C'mon, Bonesy, c'mon, boy, let's go, we gotta go, we gotta go, please, Bonesy, _please."_ But the dog, confused, did not budge. It just backed away from John some more and barked a lot more while Sam dissolved into ugly tears of panic.

John gave up and went to go get the backpack he'd seen in the bedroom. When he came back, Sam was trying to drag the dog down the rickety back steps while it whined and licked his tears off his face, anxiously wagging its tail. John wrenched it back inside by the scruff of its neck, gave Sam the same treatment, shut the back door, and frog-marched his youngest son out the front door and back to the car.

Sam was still crying, pulling against John's hold with everything he had back toward that squalid trailer. John had to watch Dean watching this. He had to see him see Sam weep not because he hadn't known if he'd ever see his family again, but because they'd come and got him. That same sense of being out of his body, of watching someone else do all this, persisted. It had to be some other man's boy staring out the back window after a Golden Retriever like the bereaved. It had to be some other man's boy looking shell-shocked in the shotgun seat. It had to be, because John couldn't even imagine being parent to this kind of anguish or to a situation this bizarre.

The place Sam had broken into maintained its actual office in downtown Flagstaff, as many such places did. John parked in front, told Dean to stay, and told Sam to come with him. Only the owner was around in the off-season, no staff. John explained who he was and why he was here. The owner listened impassively, not interrupting with any questions or reactions while John told the man what he could expect to find in his property and handed him $300 and a fake driver's license to copy. When John had finished, the owner thanked him for coming in and said the police would be in touch when he pressed charges. John said he understood and would be reachable at that number. Then they left.

As they walked back to the car, tears started running down Sam's face again, silently this time. Not knowing how to cope with this, John asked him, "Why are you crying?"

Sam didn't even raise a hand to wipe his cheek. "Bones," was all he said.

John had spent the last two weeks scared shitless. He saw Mitchell Brown, in one state or another, every time he closed his eyes. Dean didn't know about Mitchell Brown specifically, but the knowledge of his little brother alone out there in the world somewhere had been bad enough, and John would never forget the devastation on his son's face in a parade of motel rooms for as long as he lived. Now Sam was crying not because he had realized he'd hurt his family, but because of a dog.

John stopped and told him, "I don't want to hear about the dog ever again."

Wisely, Sam didn't say another word. They returned to the car. John got into the front seat, Sam got into the back, Dean just sat there. They left Flagstaff behind in total silence.

* * *

Under the phosphorescent glare of the streetlight through plexiglass walls, John's hands shook on the pay phone. He restrained himself from slamming his fist or maybe his face through the penis someone had scratched into the door with a key, put several coins into the slot, and dialed.

"He was in Flagstaff, Jim. Fucking Flagstaff, Arizona. He started in west fucking _Texas._ That's, what, six, seven hundred miles? He just turned fucking ten."

"Hello to you, too."

"He hitchhiked a quarter of the length of the country. He lied, he stole, he shoplifted, he evaded police, and he knew how to do all of it because I taught him." John pinched the bridge of his nose and took a deep breath. "I don't know how to protect them."

It was not what he'd meant to say. Men of the cloth had that effect: even those who didn't believe, if they got desperate enough, found themselves turning to a dog collar for guidance that they knew perfectly well the wearer could not provide for shit. John hated it, but he was still talking.

"I don't— I left them in Texas because I thought they'd be safer there. I was after a rawhead; I didn't want them anywhere near it. All those years, I tried so hard to keep Sammy out of hunting, but the whole time, I was setting him up for this instead. Anything could have happened to him. Anything almost did. And Dean— All those years I was lying to Sam about what's out there in the dark, _Sam_ wasn't the only one I was trying to protect. Both of them have been training since before they knew what any of it was for, but if we all go into the field together, Dean's going to feel like he has to watch out for Sam even if I tell him not to. He's fourteen; he can't deal with that kind of distraction in combat. So I can't keep them with me and I don't dare leave them behind, so what the hell am I supposed to do?"

Jim listened to his verbal diarrhea, waited a minute to see if John was through, and then asked him, "What do you _intend_ to do?"

Abruptly John felt very tired. "We're headed to Caleb's," he said. "I have to work this. This thing killing in the same place Sam passed through, while he was sitting there just a room away, Christ—it can't be coincidence. I can't sleep on this. Caleb said he's got plenty of work for the boys to do, so he should be able to keep them occupied while I run it down. I can't let either of them in on what the case is. They can't know."

"What have you found so far? Any omens?"

"I'm not exactly sure. No cattle mutilations. The weather, hard to tell; there've been storms, but no freak storms. There was one thing, though." He told Jim about the food spoilages Dean had caught. "It sure seems off. But bad bologna for a demon omen—I don't know, it sounds crazy even saying it."

Jim was quiet for a moment. "Maybe. Maybe not. If you go back far enough, the Sumerians thought demons caused all kinds of plagues and corruption."

"What demons? What kind of corruption?"

"It's a little outside my area of expertise, John. I know some people—academics, not hunters. I'll put you in touch, if you want."

John exhaled, watching his breath fog the scratched wall of the phone booth. Did he want? No, he really didn't, but what he wanted had stopped mattering the night Mary had died. Maybe a long time before that. "That would be useful. Thanks."

"In the meantime—"

"Yeah."

"You don't even know what I was going to say."

"Sure I do. I'll call you if I find another sign." Whether before or after he did whatever he was going to do about it, John didn't specify.

He hung up.

* * *

He worked it like it was any other case, because that was the only way he could stay sane enough to get anything done. True, he had to keep all trace of the hunt out of sight, but he'd had practice enough at that before Sam had found out, and Caleb had a library in his cellar.

They'd been in Wyoming for a week when he found a sign he couldn't ignore. Technically, it was also food spoilage. Two days ago, in Columbine County, North Carolina, a woman's breast milk had gone bad. That mightn't have been newsworthy had it not been in her breasts at the time.

The headline felt like a hand waving at him from across the country. He wanted to stash his children somewhere far away, as far as possible, here with Caleb or maybe with Jim. Given what had happened the last time he'd heeded that desire and left them behind, though, he didn't dare. And the evidence suggested that whatever this thing was, Sam was in no danger from it yet.

That was the whole problem.

So it looked like they were headed to North Carolina. He'd barely seen his children for over a week, and part of him knew he'd been a coward. Now he'd have to go out and confront the state and fact of his family.

He still saw Mitchell Brown at night. That was bad enough, but sometimes, he saw Dean in his place. Whatever this thing was, it seemed to have named itself Sam's protector. It might not like competition, and no one, but no one, was closer to Sam than Dean.

Maybe it was time to change that, for both their sakes.

* * *

Pamela Johnson had sepsis. She'd told her husband she felt funny one night and then their newborn baby had refused to suck, and then she'd tried to pump, and then the pain had started. Her husband Brian told John this in the corridor of the Betty H. Cameron Women's and Children's Hospital in Wilmington with his elbows on his knees, twisting his wedding ring around and around on his finger. Brian and the baby were staying with a great aunt in town. He hadn't gotten home until after 7:00 p.m. that night, he said, but Pam hadn't mentioned anything unusual.

John thanked him for his time and drove to his vacant home.

The boys were one county over, in some lake town where an acquaintance of an acquaintance ran a motor court. He didn't owe John, but he owed another guy who owed another hunter who owed John, so, with bad grace, he'd made his least attractive rental available to them on short notice and for a nominal fee. Importantly, he also knew a guy who hired a lot of teenagers in the summer. Dean needed something to keep him busy for at least half the day—not least because no such convenient options were available for Sam, and John was pretty sure that if the two of them spent the entire time in the same space, they'd kill each other. It was not an arrangement that could persist indefinitely, but he hoped against hope it could last long enough to get some answers about what he needed to do to keep his children safe.

What safe meant at this point, he did not allow himself to ask. He worried his wedding ring into the groove at the ten o'clock position on the steering wheel and drove through endless pine flats.

The Johnsons lived in one of the tidewater's ubiquitous single-wides off County Rt. 1171. The lot was about half sand, half crabgrass on top of sand and bordered by pines. John let himself in and spent an hour poring over the house for any evidence of supernatural influence, but—apart from that currently in a hospital fifty miles away—none was to be found. Then he spent another two hours going through the occupants' lives for any clue as to why a demon might target them. Again nothing.

He braced his arms on the railing of the porch built onto the back of the place. All he had to show for this trip so far was a dead end on his best lead. He squinted into the sunlight, which was bright on the sand, considering whether to give the residence one more look while he was already out here.

The Johnsons' property communicated with one farther back from the main road through a wide gap in the pine border, where the sand was deeply rutted from the tires of some heavy vehicle passing through. In the middle of the clearing beyond sat an old school bus. In front of the bus, the crabgrass was dead in a perfect circle six feet across.

Closer to, the school bus proved to be a former prison bus, painted in the distinctive flat white reserved for them in this part of the state. John had been here less than a week and had already seen several. As if to remove all doubt, the black letters spelling out _NC DEPT OF CORRECTIONS_ were still visible on the flanks under a single coat of what looked like house paint. Red letters of the same substance on the back proclaimed that _Your Miracle Is On The Way!_ Each side also had a very large cross. The bus wasn't on blocks, but had been pulled up to a little set of wooden stairs planted in the sand and looked road-ready.

John circumnavigated the bus. There were not one but four circles in the grass, one at each compass point. Plant death could be a sign of the immediate presence of evil, and when he'd seen these from the Johnsons' back porch, that had been what he'd taken them for, but each circle had a little mound in the center. He dug one up and found himself holding an empty can of lye with nine holes punched at the bottom. He replaced and reburied it.

No one had come out yet to ask what the hell he was doing on their property, but John called out anyway as he approached the bus. No answer. He stopped dead at the sight of yellow powder on the Astroturf covering the door steps. He rubbed it and lifted his fingers to his nose. Sulfur.

The Astroturf had come loose along one side of the steps. On something between a hunch and an impulse, John lifted the flap and looked underneath.

At that point, the bus's door opened and a shotgun barrel appeared through it. "Can I help you?" the person holding it asked.

John straightened up and let the Astroturf fall. "Actually," he said, "I'm starting to think I can help you."

"Oh?" The speaker was a man of about fifty-five or sixty, with silvering hair slicked back in a Billy Graham bouffant. He wore slacks and suspenders over an overshirt. Shotgun shells bulged in the pocket of the slacks. "How's that, then?"

John considered the lye and decided to take a chance on the direct route. "I think something's after you."

"You mean somebody?"

"No."

"What exactly are you trying to say, son?"

"You've had evil on your front step. Not an evil person; evil."

"Case could be made that's crazy."

"But you're not going to make it." John tilted his head. "You don't actually sound surprised."

"'The Word and the Spirit agree,'" said the man. "I believe in the Word of God, so of course I believe in the Devil and his works. Besides, I heard what happened to Pam. Nobody's going to say that could've been natural. What I'm not understanding is why you think it's after me and not my neighbors."

"Well, for starters," said John, "there's sulfur all over your doorstep."

"Oh, I put that there."

"Beg pardon?"

"Trinity dust: salt, sulfur, and red pepper. Local recipe—keeps evil away. So even if something was to want to make trouble with me, I've taken measures. Thank you kindly for your worry."

"It keeps evil away?" said John. "Any evil?"

"Well, not the tax man, but most any."

John knelt down and pulled up the Astroturf. "So these were here already, then?"

The man stared.

The steps were made of pressure-treated lumber, new and unwarped. The Astroturf itself was pretty new, sandy but free of mildew. On the middle of three steps were two rotted footprints.

The prints were pitted, black with decay that was at once fuzzy and oily. Yellow fungus rimmed their margins. The rot seemed to still be chewing down into the wood.

"I just built those," the man said dumbly. "Can't be more than three months ago."

John let the Astroturf fall back over the prints and pushed the unresisting owner back into the bus.

He looked around. The driver's seat was still in place, and one of the passenger benches had been rotated ninety degrees to serve as a couch. The rest of the space had been retrofitted with a collection of handmade shelves and cabinets, a Formica diner booth sawed off to be narrower, a hot plate, and a library catalogue bureau shoved against the rear wall to serve as a desk. A bunk was installed over this last with about three feet of clearance from the roof. The place had nothing that might be termed decoration, but there was a cross on one of the walls. Cubbyholes over the desk were bursting with books, papers, and old canning and jam jars holding everything from spare screws to medicinal herbs. Tobacco and alcohol were conspicuously absent.

The owner finally set down the shotgun, propping it in the corner behind the driver's seat. "Silas Ward," he said, offering his hand, "independent minister."

John shook with him. "John Winchester." He didn't offer a profession.

"I can tell you're not from around here, Mr. Winchester, so what brings you to Columbine County?"

Instead of answering, John asked, "Do you have any idea why something would come after you?"

"Well," said Silas, "if it's something wicked, it's probably because I'm a man of God and proclaim God's Word."

"Oh?" John asked dryly. "What book of the Bible says to bury a can of lye with nine holes at the bottom in each of the cardinal directions around your house? Is that Leviticus?"

"That's old folkcraft. Just because I know a thing or two doesn't mean I don't love Jesus, and I resent your implication. I've worked all my life to bring the Truth to those in need, and I've driven out devils from the mountains clear to the sea. I can always find the afflicted; got a gift for it."

John stopped perusing the bus and focused sharply on Silas. "A gift?"

"From the good Lord Himself."

"What kind of gift?"

Silas slipped his hands into his pockets, rocked back on his heels, and gave John a slow, deliberate, almost mechanical scan from head to toe. John's skin prickled. "For instance," said Silas, "I know that ring on your finger has outlived your wife by a wide margin. Your children have, too." His eyes were serious. "You're here because you're afraid for them. A little bit, you're afraid of them. You tell yourself you're only afraid of one, but that's a lie."

John tried not to let his face give anything away. "How are you casting out demons?"

"I lay on hands, I say Scripture. God helps me choose good verses."

"Scripture? As in the King James?"

"I don't hold with all these modern versions that are 'The Bible for Teens' or what have you, if that's what you mean."

It wasn't. "So you touch people and you quote the Bible. Anything else?"

Silas looked confused. "Like what?"

His confusion could have been feigned. He knew craft and lore like the cans and the dust on his doorstep; it could be he knew real exorcisms, too, and just didn't like to advertise his use of such tools to a Protestant flock who probably thought Latin was Satan's native tongue. More likely the worst thing this man was exorcising was teenaged rebellion and maybe the occasional Salem-style case of hysteria. True demonic possession was rare nationwide, never mind within a single state.

On the other hand, he'd just read John a lot like the way Missouri had the first time he'd met her, and while John certainly wouldn't put cold reading past any man of the cloth, most of the ones employing such techniques concertedly weren't living out of a bus. Maybe the folkcraft Silas knew was as strong as rites rubber-stamped by the Nicaean Council. Or maybe exorcists didn't need rituals if they were strong enough psychics.

Whether he was a two-bit conman or he was on a demon's hit list, it seemed to John that there was one effective way to investigate his claims and keep an eye on him at the same time. "I want to hire you," he told Silas.

"You do," said Silas skeptically.

"I hunt things like what came to your door," John said. "I go where the job takes me. One of the jobs I'm on is someone who had a brush with evil in the past. Someone in their family died, but they survived. I'm not sure what did it yet, but I want to know if the thing did anything to this person. Affected them in some way. You claim to 'know a thing or two'; I want you to find out. Think you can?"

"Oh, well," said Silas, "happy to try, what else am I here for, but what sort of payment did you have in mind?"

"Protection. Whatever came here, it got past your circle and it stood right on top of your Trinity dust. Now, I wouldn't be trying to hire you if I thought your craft wasn't good, but I'm a hunter. I've been doing this for a decade all over the country, researching and working hands-on and learning from other hunters who've spent their lives doing the same."

"I've heard of folks like that," Silas said reservedly.

"Heard of us, but not much more than that?" Silence. "That's what I thought. You know things I don't. I know things you don't. We can help each other. If you use your knowledge and your gift to find out if anything happened to this person, I'll put every protection I have on my own house—my own children—on yours, and I'll investigate your case."

Silas crossed his arms over his chest. He had a bit of a gut, but his arms were still wiry, copper-tanned against the white of his undershirt. John wondered where the hell he did laundry. "The case you show up and say I've got."

"What's your gift telling you about those footsteps on your door?" John retorted.

Silas's eyes went distant for a moment. "Nothing," he said after a while. "Nothing at all." When he refocused on John in front of him, he looked disconcerted.

His unease was contagious, but John didn't let it show. "So: my protection. My work. And…."

One of the walls had a shelf bolted onto it, where a Bible with a dozen or more placemarker ribbons sat next to an ancient wooden offering box that looked like it had once been part of a shoe-shine kit. John got out his wallet, ostentatiously counted off bills, and popped them into the box. He looked levelly at Silas.

The Reverend Ward beamed. "Yeah, that'll do. Got something of theirs?" After a moment's hesitation, John handed over a folded piece of paper from his jacket pocket; Silas took it and immediately began to pray over it.

"Aren't you going to _read_ it?"

Silas cracked an eye. "I read what God has written."

Psychometry, then. Missouri could do the same thing, so John shut up. After a few minutes of murmuring and rocking, though, Silas sighed and opened his eyes. He handed the paper back to John, still unread. "Won't do. When'd you say this person had their run-in with the Devil?"

"Ten years ago."

"I'm going to need to see them personally."

"Not an option," John said instantly.

"That constrains me a bit."

"Meaning you can't do it?"

"I didn't say that. I'll need something though. Hard to come by. Kind of pricey."

John reined in his irritation, took out his wallet again, and pushed another couple twenties through the offering box slot.

Silas still failed to be insulted. "I'll need some time to get the item I need," he told John. "Come to my next worship service."

It was Saturday afternoon now, so that wasn't too bad. "Fine, see you tomorrow. I'll bring a few things I don't have on me right now, too. Where and what time?"

"No, no, no," said Silas. "Come on the Sabbath."

"What?" John was a little irked and a lot confused.

"Saturday," Silas said placidly. "Cathedral of Praise on NC-41 at ten o'clock. Just look for the Dollar General sign, you can't miss it."

* * *

The sun was shining when John left Silas Ward's residence. Halfway back to Jewel Lake, the sky began to darken in his rearview mirror. Clouds crept up overhead. One fat raindrop hit the windshield, splattering out a good three inches in diameter. Two minutes later, another. Then another, and then it poured.

Visibility was nil. John pulled over, creeping carefully onto a shoulder he couldn't see, and watched the air churn silver.

The storm passed even faster than it had come. There was nothing unusual in that, though, John considered as he restarted the car. The blacktop shone like a ribbon under the sun that had already reappeared as the system moved on. Afternoon downpours were part of any summer in the South.

* * *

Vetting the Reverend Ward took doing, but once he found the right group of Seventh-day Adventists to ask, John got more and more names, more and more stories, and, crisscrossing the state of North Carolina from the Uwharries to the floodplain, began to assemble a picture in mosaic.

One woman sat in a gas station that also served a blue plate special at three plastic-covered tables wedged between a fridge of Snapple and a shelf of Hostess cakes. "He laid his hands on me and drove the Devil out," she told him. Her eyes, slightly yellow in the whites, bored into John's. "He has God in his mouth."

"Shyster," said a man in Smithfield. He didn't even pause in his work, loading crates onto an industrial trailer; the crates clucked, molted, and stank. "Not even a good one."

When not driving all over hell and creation, John was mostly in libraries. First he drove to Durham and talked himself into Duke; some of Jim's academic friends had deigned to call, but they were linguists and historians for the most part, and although John wasn't stupid or impatient enough to dismiss the avenues of inquiry they opened up out of hand, he could also see that those avenues would take years, not days, to bear fruit. So he localized. He scoured the local history and folklore sections of small town libraries, sat in Special Collections donated by defunct old families and full of yellowing property records and genealogies and author-inscribed copies of dissertations that had received microscopic print runs at in-state universities. He found no shortage of interesting lore, but little of it could be verified, and none of it connected to what had happened in either Tucumcari or Columbine County.

Another reason to spend the day in libraries: a seven hundred and twenty square foot trailer with crappy air con was a hell of a place to try to do anything in secret.

John sat on the end of his bed after PT one night with all his clothes on their hangers on the bed behind him. The closet was open to show the map and news clippings tacked to the back of it, but he had his journal on his lap where he'd been toying with the photo of himself, Mary, Dean, and newborn Sam in front of their house in Lawrence. The picture was from the day they'd brought Sam home from the hospital. His then-boss Mike had taken it for them, framing the family group between the home they were so proud of and the hackberry tree shading its lawn.

After the fire, the tree had been changed. Its limbs were twisted and it had dropped all its leaves on one side. He'd asked the fire marshal about it: the tree had stood pretty far from the house, and he'd never seen heat bend wood like that. Heat being a thing he'd seen a fair amount of. The marshal had shrugged and said the tree was actually rotten on the inside, probably had been getting that way for years, and the fire damage had just brought it to light. Last time John had cruised by, someone had lopped off the branches nearest the house as beyond saving.

He thumbed the edge of the photo. He should call Jim. It would be a straightforward enough conversation. Just phone the man up and ask if he'd ever heard of wood rot or footprints as demon signs. There'd be no need to bring family into it.

There was a knock at his door.

When John got the clothes back in the closet and answered, he found his youngest son on the other side of the door wearing the look he did when he was trying to be brave and trying to hide it. John hated that look. "Sam. What is it?"

"Can I go to the youth group tomorrow?" Sam asked.

John blinked. "Can you go to the what?"

"The youth group. This kid came by and told me about it. It's at the church tomorrow at one; it's about… leadership stuff."

 _No_ had been on the tip of John's tongue, but he paused. He couldn't keep Sam under house arrest forever. Awareness of that had been weighing on him; he'd only postponed dealing with it because he had no better ideas and no time to devote to finding any. But a church group worked out rather neatly, so much so that as little as he liked organized religion, John was mildly irritated not to have thought of it himself. Sam would receive a modest concession to his plain desire to be elsewhere that might prevent him from doing anything stupid, at least for a while. He could bond with kids his own age and give Dean more space to do the same, and he could do it on hallowed ground into the bargain.

"It's in a church?"

"Yeah."

"Fine. But Dean has to go with you."

"It's only for eight- to twelve-year-olds," Sam said quickly.

"To drop you off and pick you up, I meant." Having Dean chaperone Sam everywhere wasn't going to work for much longer, either, but John couldn't simply give Sam back the trust he'd lost all at once. "Dean, you will verify there is an adult on the premises before you let him out of your sight."

John had expected Sam to flinch at the rebuke in that, but he didn't. He stared right back. Huh.

* * *

Twenty days had elapsed since Flagstaff. Sparring, John knew, would have to wait; he wasn't about to arrange his sons' training schedule around their feud indefinitely, but it was still far too soon for that to end in anything but blood. Yet they had to do something together, to vent the pressure as much as to actually train.

Fireman carries. That ought to be safe enough. Forced cooperation and no slugging each other.

One of the church signs John passed on the way home Thursday evening read, _God laughs at the plans of men._ He should have listened.

His sons started off by bickering. Covertly, of course; they stuck to tactics they thought he couldn't see—and they were right, but that didn't mean he didn't know they were happening. Not for the first time, he wondered if he and his peers had been this transparent to their DIs back in basic.

But the quarrel boiled over soon enough, and John lost control. No; John had never had it, and that was the problem. He was supposed to be able to control this. He was supposed to be able to manage this. That was the point of him; whatever it was that they needed to work through this shit and get it out of their system, he was supposed to be able to find it, put them through it, grant them that catharsis and restore them to unity. If he couldn't fix this now, what about later? What if some rift opened up five, ten years down the line and they got themselves _killed_ because John couldn't figure out how to close it?

These weren't even some strange-faced by-the-batch draftees. These were his own sons. And Sam—

He was out of ideas for how to get through to Sam.

So he snapped. The moment he took his position on the bridge, he felt a niggle of regret, but he had to be the immovable object. They had to know that infighting wouldn't get them anywhere. That was the only way they'd ever see the other side of this, all three of them.

Sam kept staring at him.

Dean made it to the top all right. Doubt hit John hard when it was Sam's turn, but he couldn't back down now. Anyway, he wouldn't allow anything to happen. Of course he didn't expect Sam to do it; it was physically impossible, but the point was the lesson and John was watching his form every step of the way, same as he had Dean's. They'd be fine. It couldn't be long before Sammy tapped out, and then they could all go home.

Sammy didn't tap out.

John felt sick as he ran down the incline to where the boys had fallen, but he felt a measure of relief, too. If some of that was that at least Sam was no longer staring right at him, there was no need to dwell on it.

"That'll do for tonight," he told them. He'd keep an eye on them tomorrow, get some extra protein in the house; they'd be fine. "Dean, let's—"

"Starfish," Sam said.

A wire snare had been drawing tighter around John's chest for some time. It bit in when he watched his ten-year-old put his fourteen-year-old over his shoulders for a third time, and it didn't let up when he watched Dean help. Dean helped just a little too well. He molded his body to Sam's a little too perfectly for all of it to be conscious; and Sam knew where and how Dean's weight would move a little too exactly, like he had access to Dean's own proprioception; and even when Sam's foot slipped and John's heart shot into his mouth, Sam kept coming, because Dean kept making it possible.

To get these two to shelve their bullshit long enough to get something done had been the entire object of this exercise, but this wasn't what John had had in mind. He no longer knew how far this could go, and he could do nothing but stand there and watch.

It couldn't go forever, of course, and the second time, Sam didn't get up.

"That's enough for today." John channeled every DI, platoon leader, and power-tripping DMV officer he'd ever known to make sure his voice came out steady. "Remember not to make any noise on the way out."

Dean looked some teenaged combination of upset and pissed off. He didn't offer Sam a hand up, and Sam didn't ask for one.

When he judged that they both ought to be able to stand, John started walking, and he didn't let himself turn around. The only way he could screw this up worse would be to let his boys know he'd screwed it up when they were trusting him to take care of them, to see him agitated when they were depending on him to be in charge. He felt Sam's eyes on him the whole way back, though.

* * *

That night, John lay in his bunk watching a crane fly batter itself into the ceiling. It was sweltering. The A/C in this supposed master bedroom didn't work and it was more important for the boys to be able to sleep in something like an acceptable temperature, so here he stayed. The only air he got in here was whatever came through the foot-wide window.

Melton's Court consisted of four trailers arranged in a long rectangle and an actual motel with rooms facing them across a narrow strip of ground. John could hear the low chatter of vacationers outside, smell their cigarette smoke as they sat in lawn chairs in front of their own trailers or rooms. The humidity wasn't quite as oppressive as Parris Island, but it was close.

West Texas had been drier, if not cooler. At least the motel John had lined up for his sons back there had had functioning air con; he'd made sure of it before he'd left. And it had been walking-distance from the library. That had been important. Sam had needed a place he could sling his backpack over his shoulder and go to every day, and Dean had needed a place for him to go to, too. After all, Sam had been moody in the weeks prior. He'd been moody since Christmas.

By the time John had made it back to Goodnight, Sam had been missing for ten hours and Dean had been half-crazed with fear. John had known that he had to give his oldest something to do ASAP, both for his own sake and to have any chance at all of searching effectively for clues, so he'd sent Dean to show Sam's picture at the library. Dean had already checked there first thing, but now John gave him a script, a protocol, a time window. John hadn't needed long; the Goodnight Inn had not been much larger than this place.

The room had been a mess. Dean had tossed Sam's stuff, but not his own. Not his own, and not the laundry. So John had had to gather up Sam's clean clothes from every corner of the room, but the bottom of Dean's duffel had been untouched, a grocery bag of cassette tapes and an old _Penthouse_ exactly where Dean always kept them.

In the dim light of Melton's nightstand lamp, John unfolded a well creased piece of paper and read it even though he'd long since memorized the contents. When he was done, he carefully re-folded it and put it back underneath his gun, where he'd remember to place it back in his breast pocket when he got up. Dean couldn't read this.

* * *

The Cathedral of Praise, LLC was at 7039 NC-41, suite B, being the middle suite between a Family Dollar and the law offices of a firm advertising personal injury and family law on a billboard down the highway. The strip mall had notably low ceilings, but John assumed the Cathedral part was more metaphorical.

The bus was parked off to the side. Silas preferred not to move from spot to spot in such a conspicuous way, he had explained, but his '78 Cutlass had given up the ghost and a bicycle made it hard to spread the Word in a region with twenty-five people per square mile.

Services were still going, though it was already after ten. They were audible even from out here, various shouts, affirmations, and groans filtering out along with the distinctive cadence of an old-time southern preacher at work. John let himself into the bus to wait. He didn't nose around overmuch, thumbing a few piles of papers (sermons), pulling out a few of the card catalogue drawers (herbs but no witchcraft), discreetly testing the foam mattress for anything sewn into it (lump-free). Then he sat down on the bus seat-cum-sofa. It was easily in the mid-nineties inside.

Not long after, the door opened to admit Silas and a brief flood of hot sunlight. The preacher crossed to the couch to pump John's hand with every appearance of pleasure. "Good to see you again! God is great!" he exclaimed before going to the desk at the back of the bus. He returned after a quick riffle through one of the cubbyholes. "Here you go."

What he handed over was a slightly irregular stone about the size of a flattened shooter marble. It was a pale, milky beige, glossy yet porous in a way that was detectable when John ran his thumb over it at certain angles. John frowned. "A bezoar?"

"I don't know what you mean, but that there's a madstone."

"Comes out of a goat's stomach?"

"Goat, or deer, or what have you."

"Bezoar. Madstone must be the local term." If it even was one, and not a common rock. John turned it over in his fingers. "What exactly am I supposed to do with this, Reverend?"

Silas retrieved a thick album from the desk and pulled up a stool opposite John. He flipped open the album and enthusiastically exhibited the Polaroids inside.

"This one here," he said, pointing to the cross-section of a gray rock with a greenish tint inside, "was a snakebite." The handwritten legend underneath it read _Timber Rattler eight years old boy Oct 1979._ He flipped ahead to a reddish-brown stone stained bright yellow inside. "Rabies." _Mad possum woman of 44 Jan 1982._ He flipped some more and tapped one long finger on a Polaroid of two halves of a bisected stone. One half was in profile to show its tan exterior. The other faced the camera. Its center was black. It was hard to tell in the old photo, but it looked as if the blackness was slightly dripping. "And witchcraft."

Silas handed over the album. "Everybody knows about madstones: whatever ails you, they'll pull it out. Most folks, that's all you do, but I found out when I was younger that I could read them after. Know things. This one, her mother thought she'd been bit by a snake, but after I cured her and I held the stone with the poison in it, I found out that it wasn't a snake after all but a spell from her own father. He was abusing her and he put a root on her to try to hide his crimes. Evil man."

John considered. A scrapbook didn't mean anything. But then again, what proof would?

"How do I use it?"

"For snakes or mad dogs, you'd bind up the stone on the bite so it could draw out the poison. For witchcraft, crossed conditions, and the like—well, the works of the Devil get in a little deeper. There's no wound in the skin to hold the stone against. Those poor souls have to hold it in their mouths."

John stopped. "In their _mouths?"_

"Yes, Mr. Winchester." Silas looked him in the eye. "In his mouth."

John disliked the change of pronoun but refused to give Silas the satisfaction of acknowledging it. "For how long?"

"The longer the better, but at least an hour. Don't let him swallow it, though. At least, that'll _work,_ but you'll have a wait on your hands, if you follow."

"I follow."

"You mind bringing it back when you're finished? The bus takes a lot of gas."

* * *

Before he got back in his car, John stopped in the Family Dollar. He bought Benadryl, and then he bought Kool-Aid.

Dean wasn't difficult. The poor kid had been climbing the walls for weeks now, and all the local lore John had wasted days sifting and debunking came in handy, after all. Perhaps it was cruel to hand him a fake case he couldn't possibly solve, but John had a feeling that the job was going to be a distant consideration once Dean got out of the house, anyway.

The church where the youth group was held wasn't hard to find. Punctually at two-thirty, one of the side doors opened and a knot of boys came out, some toting Bibles, talking together. Sam's eyes were on the ground, but he talked with the others, and John saw him grin.

Sam stopped in his tracks when he saw his father waiting for him instead of Dean. Before the other boys could take note of it, he detached himself from the group and approached the car slowly, face carefully blank.

John smiled at him. "Get in, I'll give you a ride."

Some of the tension ran out of Sam. Waving quickly to his new friends, he climbed into the passenger seat with a hopeful answering smile. That was the thing that made John feel the worst.

"Where's Dean?" Sam asked as John started the car.

"Out with friends. He's been working hard, so I told him he could take the night." The look on Sam's face was unreadable. "How was youth group?"

"Fine," Sam said after a beat.

John could feel Sam's eyes on him but didn't acknowledge it. "Making friends?" he asked.

Sam shrugged.

"I asked you a question."

"Yes."

Part of John wanted to shake his head, ask, _A church youth group? Seriously?_ But he'd been the one to rubber-stamp it. Anyway, church kids might be kooky, but they ought to be harmless enough.

The speed limit on Lakeview Drive was twenty. John and Sam watched the town go by: that big fun fair, the fire station, the little post office, all the motels and glimpses of the lake between them. It was fiercely hot. When John didn't slow as they approached the motor court where they were staying, Sam straightened up in his seat. "Where are we going?" he asked.

The street curved around the mass of Camp Jewel as they passed the pizzeria and then the mini-golf. "Training. Dean has the day off. You don't."

John pointed them toward the state forest a few miles south. Sam took an avid interest in the scenery down NC-53, though he turned green when they passed a hog lagoon and he got a new appreciation for what his brother's greater freedom really entailed. John thought of the open spaces along Route 66 and wondered what it must be like for him to go from that to the contracted existence he led in Jewel Lake now. Ten years old. John couldn't really get his mind around it.

They turned off onto an access road marked by a sign prohibiting the collection of pine straw. There were miles of roads like this one, hard-packed sand winding through plantation pine and scrub fields to connect the farms and private holdings buried in them to the highway. Like everything else here, the forest was flat as a pancake, but it was secluded and spacious. If someone had happened by and seen a man timing his son on laps or tree climbs, they probably wouldn't even have thought it was worth remarking.

John worked Sam hard, partly so he wouldn't think his old man was going soft, partly to wear him out. It didn't take much. John had seen the kid wincing yesterday morning after those fireman carries. Between his vacation in Flagstaff and being grounded in a microscopic trailer afterward, he was disgracefully out of shape, but John didn't bother telling him so; he just let Sam's lack of conditioning be its own punishment under the hot Carolina sun.

He was careful, though: he didn't let Sam work himself sick.

On the drive back, they both sat boneless, letting the wind wash over their sweat. John was feeling that last tree-climb in some muscles of his inner thighs he didn't like to think about. Sam slumped beside him, slack-jawed with healthy exhaustion. It was going for seven o'clock.

When they were almost home, John said, as if on impulse, "You want to pick up a video for tonight?"

Sam straightened up at that. "Can we?" he asked, half hopeful, half suspicious.

It was important not to oversell this. Sam had abandoned his family and put John and Dean both through a kind of hell that only the night of Mary's death came anywhere close to touching; if John did an about-face out of nowhere, Sam would definitely know something was wrong. But if the kid thought this—the pizza, the video, the night off—was a peace offering, it wouldn't exactly be a lie. They were all going to have to move past what had happened eventually. So long as Sam knew hard work was going to be part of that, there was no time like the present.

"Yeah," said John. "Just let Dean think he got to have all the fun, though. He likes that."

Sam cracked a smile.

Catercorner from where they were staying, one shared parking lot served as the hub for all the essential services of a rural vacation: the Ski Burger, the Prim-o Cone, the coin laundry, the mini-golf. And, in the same building that housed the Pizza-Pizza, a Video Den.

When it came to videos, Dean always got an action movie, and Sam, with rare deviations, always got Ghostbusters. God only knew how many times he'd seen it. It looked like he'd have to pick something different this time, though; John hoped it wouldn't be _Edward Scissorhands_ again.

"They're out of _Ghostbusters."_ John nodded at the bare spot and what sat next to it. "Only got _Ghostbusters II."_

Sam paused and then reached up to pluck the _Ghostbusters II_ box from the shelf. "That's fine," he said.

John was surprised. "Thought you didn't like this one." He was being delicate: the pink goo had given Sam nightmares for three weeks straight when he'd been seven. Sam thought Dean was the only one who knew that, though.

Sam shrugged, feigning indifference as only a ten-year-old could. "It's okay."

It tugged at John's heart despite knowing better. They'd finished training for the day, but Sam was still trying to prove himself.

Or maybe Sam was three years older now and no longer frightened by bad special effects, and his dad was just a sentimental dingbat. John got _Bridge on the River Kwai_ and they went around to the pizza end of the establishment.

"What do you want on yours?" John asked. He hadn't meant to. Sam was still in the penalty box, and he knew it, and judging by the startled look he gave his father, giving him free rein over the menu was pouring it on too thick. But John couldn't help himself.

Anyway, Sam seemed to have forgotten his wariness by the time they got home, chattering over the pizza boxes he carried. "So then Daniel took Nathaniel's side even though he laughed too, and then—then they said some stuff, so Pastor Rick came up, and he was mad at me but I think he was madder at Nathaniel, because—"

He seemed to realize abruptly that he was running on at the mouth as he followed John into the dark, Dean-less living room. John, who wanted to reassure Sam but hadn't really been listening, nodded at the bathroom. "Get cleaned up before dinner. You reek."

"You do, too," Sam pointed out, but he put the pizza boxes on the counter and went.

While the shower ran, John made Kool-Aid.

Sam's love of Kool-Aid was, John felt sure, inspired solely by his father's revulsion toward it. Nothing that color could possibly be natural, and John had tried everything to get his sons to see as much. Dean didn't seem bothered by any of John's demonstrations (reading out the ingredients syllable for syllable, posting relevant news clippings on the refrigerator door, dying their underwear pink with it), but he also wasn't that fond of the stuff. Sam did seem bothered but argued that the beverages John and Dean favored were just as bad. The pH of Mountain Dew was lower than sulfuric acid, Sam claimed, and Coke had just as much sugar as Kool-Aid.

Okay, sure, said John on these occasions, but just look at your _teeth,_ Sam. Nothing does that to your mouth unless it's at least mildly evil. And Sam would just grin, red outlining every canine and incisor, and John would pretend-shudder. Sam always went for the cherry flavor.

John made this batch a little extra-strong, deliberately skewing the ratio of powder to water. The artificial fruit smell made him want to gag.

The shower shut off after three naval minutes, and the smell of still-hot pizza ensured Sam reappeared in clean clothes in record time. "Is that Kool-Aid?" he asked, crowding John's elbow in his excitement.

John gave a long-suffering sigh. "They were out of everything else other than beer. Do not go thinking this will be a regular occurrence."

Sam nodded happily, already fetching down one of the scratched Coca-Cola glasses that came with the place.

By the time John finished his own shower, Sam had already finished half a glass of the stuff and was eying the pizza box on the tray table longingly. John cracked a smile. "Go ahead." The Kool-Aid would take longer on a full stomach, but that was just as well. He needed it to be gradual.

The tape of _Ghostbusters II_ had to be rewound and this place had no remote, so Sam jumped up and down to work the VCR in between bites of pepperoni. The tape rolled. The Columbia Pictures lady held her torch aloft before its beaming light faded, and an otherwise black screen informed them it was _5 YEARS LATER._

Closeup of a cracked NYC sidewalk. Slow zoom-in on the crack. Ominous music playing: Sam flinched when the first pink slime bubbled up out of the crack, or perhaps at the exaggerated squelching noise some technician had piped in in post-production. But then Dana Barrett was chasing a runaway baby carriage, and sixty seconds later the opening titles rolled.

John shook his head and took a swallow of beer. He had forgotten exactly how bad this film was.

Sam didn't seem to mind. At the first appearance of ECTO1, none too spruce but still iconic, his head started bobbing in time to the theme song, joined to his piece of pizza by a string of cheese. A catchy song and some plucky New Yorker spirit could make a lot of things go down easy, it seemed. But really, who could blame a ten-year-old for that.

"Sam, you know that what I do—what _we_ do—is important, right?"

Sam froze. He kept his eyes on the screen while he chewed, swallowed, and said, "Yeah, I know, Dad."

John could have pursued it. Perhaps he should have; this, right here, was so clearly the moment to have it out about Flagstaff if ever there was going to be one. But the last thing John needed was to make anything about this evening memorable.

The couch in this place wasn't that large. Neither was Sam, of course, but he had a pre-teen's way of taking up space even when he tried not to. After two and a half pieces of pizza and his third glass of Kool-Aid, he was sagging against the stained velour with his knees and elbows everywhere. John sat at the far end. The stone in his pocket dug into his thigh where it wedged between the arm of the sofa and his pocket.

When Sam stared yawning before ten p.m., John teased him lightly about being out of shape. Sam, engrossed in the Ghostbusters' examination of Dana Barrett's baby, gave no reply.

John stood up with his mostly-fully beer as if to get himself another and nodded at Sam's empty glass. "You sweated a lot today. Want some more?"

Sam sort of startled, but it was a little slow. "I can get it." He started to push himself up out of his slump, which seemed to take an effort.

John waved him back to his seat. "I'm up anyway."

He opened the fridge, swapped his open beer for a new one, poured Kool-Aid into the Coca-Cola glass. It was a Disney one. Snow White's features had been obliterated by repeated washing; he watched her face fill up with red.

_—What do you think?_

_—Well, he's ugly. I mean, he's not Elephant Man ugly, but he's not attractive. Was his father ugly?_

_—Oh, but seriously, there's nothing unusual about him, is there?_

John set the glass down in front of his youngest son and popped the tab on his beer. Sam's glazed eyes were on the screen when he reached out for the glass.

Street scene. The Ghostbusters were digging up asphalt, a stereotypical cop was accosting them, Bill Murray was doing a bit off Harold Ramis, and Dan Ackroyd was being lowered into a mephitic underworld.

_—We're breaking through. I'm in some kind of chamber. There's— SLIME!_

Wrapped around his glass of Kool-Aid, Sam tensed.

_—It's a river of slime! There's gotta be 25,000 gallons of it!_

John had forgotten how cheesy the effects were in this flick. The slime that had so terrified Sam was glowing, lurid, VHS-fuzzy pink, with sound effects added in to signal viscosity. They'd used real goo for the close-ups, John guessed, some kind of pearly paint mixed in. No self-respecting son of a Marine who killed supernatural evil for a living had any business having nightmares about something pink and pearly. Probably that was why Sam had begged Dean frantically never to tell anyone about it the night that John had listened through the door.

_All right, Sammy, I won't tell, chill out._

_Promise._

_Duh, I promise. Go back to sleep._

_I can't. I can't, Dean; I can't._

_Shh. Shh, shh, calm down. You have to calm down or you'll wake Dad._

_I can still feel it. I can_ taste _it._

_Don't be stupid, it was just a dream. Crap. Fine. C'mere, you can sleep with me. Only once, though._

_Okay._

_Okay._

Pink tentacles started reaching for Dan Akroyd's ankles, and Sam stood up to go to the bathroom.

"Want me to pause it?" John asked.

"No, that's okay," said Sam, in a voice nearly normal.

Sam peed long enough that the Ghostbusters were in court by the time he came out. He reached over the back of the sofa for his empty Kool-Aid glass, but John put his hand flat over the top. "You've had enough," he said. "I don't want you staying up all night on a sugar rush."

They watched the movie. Sam's eyes began to droop. He listed. By the time the back-in-business montage started, his mouth was open and his eyes were closed.

John's heart beat fast.

He turned down the TV and listened. He waited until Sam's breathing was deep and even before he said, quietly, "Sammy?"

No response.

John eased his hands under Sam's armpits and tugged until his head was in his lap. As expected, the movement made Sam stir and murmur, but after a minute of stroking at his hair, he settled. Careful not to disturb him, John reached into his pocket with his free hand. He consulted his wristwatch and marked the time. Then, holding the madstone between two fingers, he worked it carefully past Sam's lips and onto his tongue.

Getting the stone into his mouth wasn't the hard part, not with him sleeping like this. The hard part was keeping him from choking on it. That was the part that required John to stay absolutely still for the next hour.

Sam's mouth was hot and spit-slick on his fingers. John could feel the give of his tongue, the smallness of his teeth, the insides of his cheeks as he held the stone in place. John's gorge rose. He fought it back.

He cradled Sam's neck to keep his head immobile and make sure the madstone fell out rather than in if something went wrong. The thing was treacherously slippery, and John pressed his thumb lightly up under Sam's jaw to stabilize his grip, terrified equally at the thought of Sam waking and the thought of him choking.

_—And dig this! There was a prophesy, just before his head died. His last words were: "Death is but a door, time is but a window. I'll be back"!_

Sam's breath washed over John's knuckles on every exhalation. The stone slipped for a second; John adjusted his grip, pushing the object a bit more firmly into his tongue. Sam's breath hitched. It shifted, coming more heavily through his nose as his body unconsciously reacted to the obstruction in his mouth, and then he stirred himself. John petted his nape with the hand holding Sam's neck until the momentary tension ran out of Sam's body and he sagged in his father's lap again. John glanced at his watch and shut his eyes.

The Ghostbusters argued over takeout, hung pictures dripping with development solution to dry. A face looked out of them. The pictures caught fire. The fire caught the rest of the room, and Sam made a noise and began to move.

First his spine bowed. His heels pressed into the sofa cushion, but without force. Small, distressed sounds came out of his throat: John felt them more than heard them. His shoulders rolled and his legs bicycled. All of it happened in surreal slow motion that was worse, almost, than the writhing itself. Sam's eyelashes fluttered as John inadvertently triggered his gag reflex while trying to adjust his grip, and Sam made a low noise around the fingers in his mouth.

A spasm went through John's heart, and he thought, _Fuck you. You can't have him. I raised him, and he's mine._

Whatever it took. Whatever it took.

After what felt like an eternity, Sam's movements slowed and then stopped, his intermittent noises petering out to nothing. John let his breath out. He tried to move his fingers as little as possible so as not to feel the saliva between them.

The minute hand on his watch ground out a full circle. John made himself stay where he was for an additional fifteen minutes, just to be sure, just in case, because Ward had said _an hour at least_ and John couldn't have this be for nothing. Then one more minute, and then he steeled himself, took a deep breath, and extracted the bezoar and his hand from his son's mouth as fast as he dared. The stone's porosity made it cling to Sam's tongue. John had to tug to get it off.

He kept it together long enough to drop the madstone on the tissue he had ready for the purpose and to settle Sam gently onto the couch before he bolted for the kitchen sink. He washed his fingers under the water, shuddering at the feeling of dissolving saliva. He grabbed the dish soap and washed them again.

It didn't help, really.

* * *

John gave himself thirty seconds to calm down before he went to check on Sam. Sam's eyes moved under their lids when John took his pulse, but he never woke even when his father picked him up and carried him to bed. In the cramped little bedroom Sam shared with Dean, John cranked up the shitty A/C, tucked the blanket over Sam's shoulders, and smoothed his hair where it curled at the temples from sweat. Then he fled.

Silas lived a little over an hour away. John almost drove right past the Johnson residence, as there was nothing really to mark it in the dark other than the odometer. No house number. No car out front. The husband had made it sound like they'd probably stay in Wilmington a while, if the wife survived. John eased the Impala past their home and through the gap leading into Silas's lot. The air felt like the storms forecast for tomorrow might be getting tired of waiting.

John had wondered what Silas did for light; when the door opened to his knock, he had his answer in the form of a gas mantle lantern. "Come in," said Silas mildly as John charged past him.

John clenched a wadded-up bandanna in his fist. "This had better work, Ward. If you are yanking my chain, so help me."

Silas looked genuinely surprised. "Well, of course it will," he said. "We're doing the work of God."

John ground his teeth.

Silas hung the lantern on a hook in the ceiling. He clapped John on the shoulder and pushed him toward the bus seat couch, then pried the bandanna out of John's fingers. He parted its folds, held the madstone up to the lantern's light, and hummed.

"Well?" said John.

"I've always thought these were rather beautiful. Like country pearls. Pity to have to destroy them, but there you are."

"Didn't come here to buy jewelry, Ward. Are you going to read that or what?"

"Have to wait three days."

John jumped to his feet.

Unperturbed by the wordless threat, Silas tucked the stone away into one of his little drawers. "'In the fullness of time.' Over the years I've found it's best to wait a bit to open them. Something seems to happen inside; it comes clearer, easier to read. Too short and it's kind of muddy; too long and it starts to fade. About three days seems to be best."

John paced. "All right. All right. Call me as soon as you read it."

"Where exactly do you suppose I'm hiding a telephone?" Silas said gently.

Right. No wires to the Salvationmobile. And where _did_ the man defecate, anyway. In place of the irritation he'd have expected, John found in himself only exhaustion. "So Tuesday night, then?"

"Wednesday morning. Please don't call on me in the middle of the night again."

John could only nod. He felt the need for sleep too acutely himself just then to argue.

"And how about my case?" Silas asked.

A gust of wind rocked the bus, making the lantern swing on its hook. "I'll know more the next time I see you," said John. If Silas thought the timing coincidental, he didn't say so.

Out in the car, John hunted through the glove box for the No-Doz he kept stashed there and consulted the packet dully before he replaced it. He'd had longer nights than this. At the moment he couldn't remember when, but he knew that he had. He shut the glove compartment. When he reached up to kill the dome light, he saw the first two fingers on his left hand were stained faintly pink.

* * *

The first thing that greeted John when he got home was the sight of his oldest sprawled on, mostly, the couch, fully dressed under a sheet and drooling open-mouthed onto the cushion. He looked like one of those dogs who passed out in ludicrous positions that shouldn't be anatomically possible, never mind comfortable.

It touched John and made him feel his age at the same time. Dean had far from forgiven Sam, that was clear, but still he'd camped out on the sofa after his night of teenaged revelry rather than disturb his little brother stumbling in. John sat in the broken chair beside the TV and stared at the boy on the couch. _It's for you,_ he did not say. _It's for Sam, yes, but it's also for you._

John leaned forward, sniffed his son, and recoiled. He shook his head as he pushed to his feet, laughing silently despite himself.

He caught a few hours, albeit in shallow snatches rather than anything that felt like true sleep. The storms were harrowing that night. John got up a few times to check on Sam and Dean, and that the car was clear of tree branches. He resigned himself to getting up at dawn. When he emerged into the living room, Dean's head lifted from the couch. Father and son looked at each other, each wearing the wreckage of a hell of a night.

He checked on Sam again. He seemed fine, if clearly still sleeping it off. He'd probably wake up needing to pee worse than ever in his life and he might get to experience his first hangover, but he was healthy. He hadn't been harmed in any way. He'd never even know. John nearly had a heart attack when Dean was right on the other side of the door as he came out of the bedroom.

He could feel Dean eyeballing him throughout breakfast. John wondered what he looked like, but had no appetite to actually find out. They restored themselves to life with coffee and grease in companionable silence.

It occurred to John, as they sat together, to send Dean away. Caleb had never offered, but John knew he'd step up if it came to it. Singer probably would too, though things had been fraying there ever since Sam had found out; the man had always whiffed of longing for a child, and John had shoved down more than once an uncomfortable sense that he had an eye on his own. Actually, Jim Murphy might be the best bet: he wouldn't take Dean himself, not long-term, but he had connections, networks, affiliations with actual, real-world programs that had nothing to do with hunting, the kinds of people who opened their homes and actively encouraged regular visits from social workers.

It wouldn't be permanent, but it wouldn't exactly be temporary. It would be until John could figure out what was really going on and stop it, and in a moment of unaccustomed clarity, he understood that as far as those things went, the sun had set on _just for a while_ long ago.

Reason said sending Dean away would be safest, that it would give the best chance to both. There was no reason, really, not to.

"I need your help with Sam," John said.

Dean's eyes were wide and unguarded. "Yeah, of course."

"Just keep an eye out. Let me know if you see anything concerning."

What Dean was afraid of was another Flagstaff. He had no idea what kept John up at night, and it was going to stay that way, but he was fearful enough to be on alert and hurt enough to tell John whatever he saw. This would be the compromise, John told himself. Put some distance between Dean and Sam, but keep them both close to himself; use Dean as a source of information and help keep both boys safer that way.

Selfishness was his motive. It was for his own sake, not his sons', that he was keeping them together; he was too weak to give up his child. It certainly wasn't because what he'd seen out on the ATV course scared him almost as much as the thing in the Tucumcari men's room.

* * *

Technically John had things to occupy him in the next three days, given he'd yet to make a shred of progress on the question of why a demon might be interested in Silas Ward, but all of it felt like waiting. The fact that a demon apparently was made Ward's claims credible. That was all that mattered, really: answers were on the horizon.

On Tuesday night, Dean went out to see his friends and no doubt do something stupid. John decided to take a break after Dean interrupted him to ask for leave—his focus had been shot to hell since evening PT, anyway—and found Sam in the kitchen finishing a sandwich only to realize he'd forgotten about dinner.

John loitered in the kitchen and tried to figure out if he was even hungry or not. "You can walk to the youth group tomorrow," he said to fill the silence. Sam hadn't even reacted to his arrival. "I probably won't be back in time, and Dean might not, either."

Sam hunched over on his stool. "They're not having it tomorrow."

"Oh." John hunted for something sage to say and didn't find anything. "Well, if you want to go out, you can, but you have to leave the place and a phone number with Melton. Or whoever's on the check-in desk."

Sam picked at a crust. "I remember."

John had the sudden urge to do something ridiculous, like promise to take them to a ball game after this, to a wrestling match, to the beach. The real beach, not this place. Instead he made a sandwich and sat down across from Sam to eat it.

Sam had a very pointy face. That had come out of nowhere. Up to the age of about seven, he'd been downright chubby-cheeked, and then suddenly the puppy fat had sprouted angles. He couldn't be called gangling—he was too short to gangle—but it was starting to look like he might get there. John didn't know who he looked like. Not his brother. Not really Mary. Not him, certainly.

"Dean's out with friends," he said irrelevantly.

Sam made a face. "He has a girlfriend."

John was surprised. Sure, he'd seen Dean's head turning to follow every tube top and pair of shorts a community oriented toward summertime recreation had to offer—hence the condom, hence the warning—but he hadn't realized there was anyone in particular. He'd just assumed Dean was hanging out with his workmates, for some reason. "What, really?"

Sam nodded.

"Oh." There didn't seem anything more than that to say. It raised questions about exactly how late he'd have to wait up for his oldest to report back, but if nothing else, John was pretty sure Dean knew better than to miss a curfew or a check-in after the stunt Sam had pulled.

He sent Sam to bed before eleven and went to the motel office to check in with the owner. Dean had a girlfriend, Sam had a youth group, and John still had an unsolved case in the person of Silas Ward, waiting for its big break tomorrow. He squared another week with Melton, who was in a pretty good mood for once, and helped himself to a styrofoam cup of coffee from the urn in the lobby. Someone else came in, a jovial, sunburned guy Melton greeted cordially, and leaned against the front desk to talk about boats and boating.

"—some _weird_ rot on the planking," John overheard just as he was going out the door. "Right down by the water."

John didn't stop. He crossed the strip of ground between the motel and the trailers with his heart pounding, and glanced toward the lake. This close to the Fourth of July, the dock was still crowded at this hour, adults out there chatting on lawn chairs; he'd have to wait.

He returned to the position he'd abandoned when Dean had knocked on his door hours ago: sitting on the end of his bed and staring into the closet, with the research taped up inside it and all his clothes piled on hangers around him. He let his eyes go unfocused over Pam Johnson's home address, a xerox of Akkadian relief, a time line of demonic manifestations since 1848, tables of weather data for eastern New Mexico, a map of North Carolina. But if something was looking back at him, he couldn't make it out through the fog.

A little after two a.m. he headed out. The world was quiet but not silent. TV glare and low conversations leaked from behind Venetian blinds, along with the subdued complaints of children long since sent to bed who knew they were pushing their luck, and their parents' equally muted responses. So many human beings huddled together out here on the sand, like the camp of an accidental tribe in the desert.

But everyone had retreated behind their flimsy tent walls, leaving the docks themselves empty. John walked down the one for Melton's Court, his boots loud in the quiet. Some drunken asshole was on a jet ski somewhere, but it was a far-off noise, and the lake's lapping was louder.

A light at the end of the neighboring dock illuminated the planks well enough, but John could see nothing. They looked the same as they had on Sunday: old, dried out, warped in places, but not rotten. No black or yellow slime mold. Certainly no footprints. He checked the next few docks down, too, but only saw more of the same. He returned to their dock, the one yards away from where Sam lay sleeping, and went over it again with a penlight, even bending over to look underneath, but though he found plenty of muck, there was nothing that looked like rot. He switched the light off and slipped it back in his pocket.

He shook his head at himself. He was getting old and paranoid.

And it was late. Reflections on the water gave him just enough light to read his watch: two thirty-seven in the morning, coming up on that three a.m. curfew of Dean's. John washed a hand over his face and stood looking out over the water. He had faith in his eldest, but he wasn't going to be able to sleep worth a damn until he knew exactly where the kid was anyway. It was peaceful out here, and he had line of sight on the door to their trailer. He might as well wait.

Someone was playing Echo & the Bunnymen out of a tinny speaker somewhere: _In starlit nights I saw you / So cruelly you kissed me._ Mary had loved this terrible, cornball song. Every time it came on the radio, he'd groan and she'd warn him not to change it. He could still see her, one night back before either of the kids: a night road somewhere, the windows rolled down, her hair catching in the wind and her pale wrist as she'd reached over to turn it up. _Fate / Up against your will / Through the thick and thin / He will wait until / You give yourself to him._

John stood with his hands in his pockets and the smell of lake in his nose and thought, I loved you. There had always been a lot he didn't understand about his relationship with Mary, but he was sufficiently sure of that to wear the ring every day. _I loved you, I miss you, I still want justice for you, but if I thought I could keep our sons alive without ever knowing what happened to you, I'd drop all of it right the hell now._

Echo & the Bunnymen had switched off at some point. The lake lapped at its shore. Even nostalgic old farts had gone to bed.

Sounds of someone swimming had for some time been growing closer, and now John watched a young man approach the dock in a slow, exhausted freestyle. The strokes were loud, because he had all his clothes on.

The swimmer reached out and pulled his front half up onto the edge of the dock, about a yard away from John's feet. Afterward he seemed to realize John was there and looked up.

Dean was covered in the kind of crud John had seen on the underside of the planks earlier; it streaked his face, gluing his hair down like a swimmer's cap and showing his eyes stark in the dimness. He was a dead ringer for Swamp Thing. He and John looked at each other for a while.

"Black, boy, or preacher's daughter?" John asked, sort of resigned.

"Preacher's daughter," said Dean, much the same.

John checked his watch: two fifty-two. Well. He wasn't late for curfew, anyway. "Told you," John said, and having a sense he was going to need it, he went to go to sleep.

In the wavering margin before dawn, he dreamed of a deer that choked on a stone.

* * *

Wednesday was a hell of a morning. Eric Coleson was on the phone with him before six a.m., and it seemed whatever Dean had done that had required him to swim home, he'd used his (former) employer's property to do it. John would take the time to be angry later. For now, he negotiated reparations (Coleson wanted five times Dean's wages to date not to press charges; John talked him down to two and a half on the strength of the nebulous favor owed him by Melton's cousin's friend and the fact that the property in question had not actually been lost or damaged) and got ready to head out to Silas's. Dean himself he left passed out cold in the bedroom he shared with his brother. At least John wouldn't have to drop him off for work first.

Except getting to County Rt. 1171 turned out to be a whole production. Since the storms Saturday night, John had come and gone to Durham and points west plenty of times with few issues, but everything south of the Cape Fear was a mess. Bridge and road closures forced him to take a detour, which turned into three thanks to a gas station attendant explaining it in gibberish. Then, when he finally reached the turn-off, he had to drag a fallen pine out of the Johnsons' driveway, since it seemed they still hadn't been back.

Finally he parked in front of Silas's bus. The heat of the day was by now spitting on its hands and getting down to it, the last of the morning shade gone; the sun beat down directly on the four straw-yellow circles in the grass.

John knocked. No reply. Not being in much mood to wait any longer, he was about to use the slim jim when he saw the index card sticking out from under the door.

A note. Silas had left him a note. The son of a bitch knew John had a drive to get here, knew he was waiting on news of his _son,_ and he'd gone out for goddamned lunch or something and left him a fucking note. John yanked it free.

The index card was not a note but a three-column table with a list of names in the center, all written in different hands and pens, and a series of dates stamped neatly to either side of each: a library book checkout card. The typewritten call number was still legible in the top corner, 813.52 GIP, but the author and title had been obliterated by being wet when the card had been closed in the door. The wetness was blood.

He tried the door. It wasn't locked.

The smell inside was overpowering: iron, feces, sulfur. Bile. Other wastes from higher up in the intestine. For an instant before he'd gotten the door open, a mental reconstruction of Mitchell Brown as he must have been found in the Red Eye bathroom had flashed in John's mind, but this didn't look like that. Whatever had happened to Mitchell Brown had been fast.

John's hands shook. They were clammy and they shook. 

Silas's corpse was propped against the bus seat sofa, eyes wide and mouth agape. The rest of him was mostly in the middle of the bus, albeit contained in some directions by encountering the ceiling or walls. The front windshield could have been made road-ready without too much difficulty. The back of the bus was nearly pristine.

Stepping carefully, John made his way back to Silas's desk. The madstone sat beside a geologist's hammer and chisel on a clean sheet of foolscap, neatly cracked in two. The two halves lay face-down on the paper. John picked one up.

The outside of the stone was pale buff, minutely speckled but otherwise unmarked. The inside was exactly the same.

* * *

He broke into the Johnsons' house to use their phone. The call would show up if police ever checked records, but he didn't care. The nearest pay phone was too far.

The Johnsons' phone was mounted on the kitchen wall under a shelf of cookbooks. It rang. Once. Twice. Three times. Four. Five.

Dean's voice was sleep-crusted. "Hello?"

"Get your brother and pack right now."

"He's not here." Dean sounded completely alert now. "Went"—Sound of paper, like somebody taking a note off the fridge.—"to some birthday party with the church kids."

"Wherever he is, find him. Then wait at the house. I'll be there soon. Be ready to leave and do not go anywhere."

John hung up halfway through Dean's _yessir._

He started wiping his prints, already computing the best route back to Jewel Lake. The return trip should be faster now that he knew where the closures were. He wiped the kitchen counter he'd gripped while the call rang. He wiped the Trimline phone cord. He wiped the ivory plastic receiver and the cradle. He wiped the bottom edge of the cookbook shelf that he'd brushed when fumbling for the phone. He stopped.

Some of Pamela Johnson's cookbooks were clearly her own property, worn with use and tacky with aerosolized grease, but most were in clear plastic jackets with numbered labels at the base of the spines: library books. Between _101 Low-Sodium Entrees_ and _The L.L. Bean Game and Fish Cookbook_ sat an unjacketed clothbound volume stamped with the call number 813.52 GIP. It was a 50s or 60s edition of Old Yeller.

A postcard fell out when John opened it. He looked down. The card between his feet read, _GREETINGS FROM JEWEL LAKE (Come Find N.C.'s Best-Buried Treasure!)._

It had been marking the last page of chapter fifteen. The paper was yellowed but the card had left an odd void where it had been pressed against it, a lighter rectangle where the text stood out crisp:

> Then it hit me what Mama was getting at. All my insides froze. I couldn’t get my breath.
> 
> I jumped to my feet, wild with hurt and scare. “But Mama!” I cried out. “Old Yeller’s just saved your life! He’s saved my life. He’s saved Little Arliss’s life! We can’t—”
> 
> Mama got up and put her arm across my shoulders again. “I know, Son,” she said. “But he’s been bitten by a mad wolf.”
> 
> I stared off into the blackness of the night while my mind wheeled and darted this way and that, like a scared rat trying to find its way out of a trap.
> 
> “But Mama,” I said. “We don’t know for certain. We could wait and see. We could tie him or shut him up in the corn crib or some place till we know for sure!”
> 
> Mama broke down and went to crying then. She put her head on my shoulder and held me so tight that she nearly choked off my breath.
> 
> “We can’t take a chance, Son,” she said, sobbing. “It would be you or me or Little Arliss or Lisbeth next. I’ll shoot him if you can’t, but either way, we’ve got to do it. We just can’t take the chance!”

John snapped the book closed, wiped it, and put it back on the shelf. After a moment's hesitation, he bent and picked up the postcard. He turned it over.

 _If you really loved her,_ someone had written, _you'd thank me._


	3. Sam

**_June 20th, 1993_ **

On a Sunday morning, Sam sat alone.

He was on the roof. The shingles were hot under his bottom, even in the shade afforded by the young pine he'd shimmied up to get here, but this was the farthest limit of his freedom at the moment. Of course, he'd still get Dad's belt if he were caught up here, but technically, Sam had only been told he couldn't leave the house, not that he had to stay inside it.

Arms linked around his knees, he watched the church service going on below him without much interest. Beside the trailer was a field. Normally it sat empty, but this morning it was full of cars and trucks and families in those folding chairs with fabric cup holders in the arms, facing an open pavilion topped with a cross. A band pumped South-y sounding music out of big speakers in the bed of a truck while people put their hands in the air, sitting or standing, and swayed. It was weird.

Not half as weird as the preacher himself, though. He talked and was dressed nothing like Pastor Jim, who was Sam's main point of reference for clergy. Pastor Jim wore a black shirt with a white collar and preached in measured voice from a pulpit in a nave that was always cool and quiet no matter how hot it got outside. This man wore trousers and a plain white shirt, like Dad when he came home from pretending to be somebody and took off his suit jacket. There was no pulpit in the pavilion. The preacher jumped and paced all around the stage, gesturing wildly and spitting his words. Sam could see spots where sweat stuck his shirt to his body from all the way up here.

"Friends, today is a glorious day." That was another difference between this guy and Pastor Jim: he used a microphone, his voice booming out of the same speakers as the music. "Today, we are celebrating a victory for Christ. And the angels are singing with us! Does anybody here believe the angels are singing today?"

Murmurs of _yes, Lord_ and _hallelujah._

A breeze off the lake lifted Sam's hair along the back of his neck, where he could feel a sunburn starting. He wondered what time it was, and how long before Dad or Dean came back. Not that it really mattered anymore. Dad was Dad and Dean hated his guts. At least like this he got to be alone in peace.

A boat skimmed over the distant center of the lake, a water-skier the size of an ant flying along behind. The south shore bristled with docks and piers. From up here, Sam could pick out the funfair a mile away by its ferris wheel, which stood silent and inglorious in morning sun. Behind him, the pizza place was firing up its ovens in anticipation of the after-church crowds, and the smell wafting from it made his stomach growl. The closest Sam had approached any of these places was nightly PT runs that left his shoes sticky with drips of other people's ice cream.

"Pray with me, friends!"

The shout made the speaker scratch with distortion. Sam glanced down in time to see the preacher get in the lake with all his clothes on.

Not alone, either. He led a woman with a mullet down a set of stairs at the back of the pavilion that went straight into the water. She, too, was wearing all of her clothes. 

Obviously Sam knew what baptism was, but he'd never seen one and Pastor Jim, according to Dad, "Just hit them with a squirt gun on the forehead." (Sam had eventually begun to suspect this description was not literal.) By contrast, this woman and the preacher were wet up to their midriffs. The crowd bunched up along the shoreline, swaying, moaning, and weeping with their hands in the air.

"I call upon you to witness the death to sin and rebirth in Christ of our sister Patricia Suzanne!" The preacher had left the microphone up on the stage, but he seemed to be doing just fine without it. "Our hearts are heavy with the wickedness of the world and our wickedness in it, but I say to you, God raises us up! We are stained with evil deeds and evil thoughts, but I say to you, God washes us whiter than snow! We are dead; oh! friends, we are dead men walking, but God remembers us, and He calls us forth from the tomb of our selves, our sins, our shame. Who here believes that God can do that for us?" The preacher raised his voice to a bellow. "Who here believes that God can do _anything?"_

Sam wasn't totally sure that God would be able to save this guy's trousers, but going by the roar it set up, the crowd didn't share his doubts.

The preacher set his hands on the woman's shoulders. She looked about Dad's age, though it was hard to be sure from this distance. "Patricia Suzanne," he asked, "have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior?"

Patricia did not have the kind of lungs the preacher did, but the crowd magnified her answer for her: _yes, yes, yes, o Lord!_

"Do you renounce the works of Satan and turn your eyes to Heaven?"

_Save us, save us, save us, God!_

"Are you ready to be washed clean?"

_Clean us, clean us, clean us, Jesus!_

Patricia's words themselves were inaudible, private down there in the lake. Sam cringed. Something about watching and hearing the preacher when he couldn't hear her side of the conversation at all gave him weird, second-hand embarrassment. Or something. Whatever the feeling was, it was uncomfortable.

The preacher shifted, planting one hand on the woman's back and holding her by the nose with the other. He said, "I baptize you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins," and he pushed her under the lake.

She was up again in an instant, water streaming off her face, hands folded over her chest like a corpse until her mouth opened, gasping. Then she was standing on her own two feet again, and trembling, she reached her arms up to the sky. A thunderous roar went up from the congregation.

This place was so weird.

The church meeting started to break up. Coolers and chairs went back into trucks; trucks pushed across the street in the direction of pizza and ice cream; families that had come out of the trailer park on the other side of the chapel field, which seemed to be about half of them, started seeping back into its sponge of campers and narrow alleys, the older and broader members often by golf cart. Some people hung around in the field, grown-ups talking and kids running amok. One girl threw a chunk of pool noodle, over and over, for a Golden Retriever that leapt up on her every time it brought the thing back. Sam put his head on his knees, facing away from the field.

A Frisbee landed on the roof. He jerked his head up.

"Hey, can we have our Frisbee back?"

Sam looked over the edge of the roof. There was a group of kids in a line down there, four of them. They stared at him. Sam tossed the Frisbee down and clasped his knees again.

"Are you okay?" one of the kids asked.

"Leave me alone."

"I was just asking."

The boys remained, eyeballing Sam in frank curiosity. Despite himself, he started to blush. He probably looked weird sitting up here, but he hadn't thought about that before. No one had ever noticed him.

Another one of the boys, a slightly older-looking one with a rat tail, asked, "Your family on vacation or something?"

"Yeah, or something."

The kid on the end, the tallest and heaviest, said, "You talk funny. Where you from?"

Flaring defensive, Sam said, "I'm from everywhere. I've been to thirty-nine states and I've lived in seventeen."

"Liar," said the boy with the rat tail.

Sam's face heated. "Am not."

"How old are you?" This from the boy who'd asked if Sam was okay. He had no distinguishing features, really.

"Ten."

"What grade're you in?"

"Sixth."

"Hey, you're in sixth grade, Nathaniel," said the large boy to the one who'd called Sam a liar. The latter's eyes narrowed at Sam.

"You wanna come ride bikes with us?" asked the fourth boy, who was short with a buzz cut and a round, pink face.

"I don't have a bike."

"Oh." The boys glanced at each other, shrugged, and raised feet back to pedals. "Bye," a couple of them called.

They biked away.

By now the field was empty except for the band still packing up their equipment. Kids staying at the same place as the Winchesters yelled as they burst out of their rooms in swim suits, pelting toward the lake. The dog was gone. The shingles were starting to scorch the seat of Sam's pants for real now, but he still didn't move from the roof.

The sound of bike wheels in sand made him look down. One of the kids was back, the unremarkable one. He stopped immediately beneath where Sam sat.

"I'm Tyler," he said. "What's your name?"

Sam's fingernails bit into his elbows. "Sam."

"I'm ten, too," Tyler offered. "But I'm gonna be in fifth grade."

Not knowing what comment to make, Sam only nodded.

Tyler swung his bike pedal back and forth with the foot that wasn't on the ground. "Have you really been to all those places?"

"Yeah." Then, because no family characteristic was too loathsome to serve as ammunition in establishing standing—almost—Sam added, "My dad's a salesman. We travel a lot."

"What about New York City? Have you been to New York City?"

Sam picked at a thread on the hem of his shorts. "New York kind of sucks. It's hot and there's nowhere to go and—" _Dad cussed the whole time about how expensive everything was,_ he narrowly avoided saying. "D.C.'s better. I went on a field trip there; there's a bunch of parks and all the museums are free."

Tyler looked impressed. "I want to travel some day," he said enviously.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"How come?"

Tyler shrugged. He peered up at Sam. "How come you're sitting up there?"

Sam's turn to shrug.

"Ain't it hot?"

"Yeah," Sam admitted. He shifted; he'd sat immobile up here long enough to get stiff, and looking back on the last hour or so, it did seem like kind of a stupid thing to do.

"How long are you gonna stay here?"

"Dunno," said Sam. "We never know."

Tyler scratched the side of his nose with a knuckle. "Do you want to come to the youth group?"

"What's that?"

"It's fun. It's for eight- to twelve-year-old kids. We have it Wednesdays and Saturdays at one."

"What do you do?"

"Play games and stuff. Learn about leadership. There's pizza and soda."

"There is?"

"Yeah, always. Well, sometimes fruit punch. You should go."

Sam was grounded until kingdom come, but he did not really want to say that to a complete stranger. "I'll ask my dad," he said instead. "Where is it?"

"At the church," Tyler answered, like this was obvious.

"What, here?"

"No, at the _church._ On Lakeview."

Strictly speaking, the chapel Sam had indicated was on Lakeview. Everything in this town was on Lakeview. "The white cinder block one?"

"Oh, no, that's the Black church. The _church._ It's brick, it's across from Goldston's."

Sam was still a little fuzzy on the distinction, but there was a snowball's chance of him going anyway, so he just nodded.

Tyler grinned, showing a gap where he was waiting on a final tooth. "See you!"

"See you," Sam echoed.

Tyler kicked off, swinging around in the sand and gaining speed as he pedaled after his friends. After a minute, Sam got up and climbed back down the tree and in through the window.

* * *

Every morning, Sam had a chores list. Most of it was busywork: cleaning their dump de jour (mostly a matter of wiping up the yellowish mildew that reappeared in the bathroom each day like magic), maintaining weapons that weren't actually being used, detailing the fridge. The only task that served a real purpose was the laundry. Everybody sweated in this climate, and Dean's work clothes were pretty much radioactive by the time he got home each day. None of the Winchesters had an extensive wardrobe, living as they did, so most days, Sam took the duffel of general laundry plus the Hefty bag of Dean's farm clothes down the street to the coin laundry.

First he was required to check in with old man Melton. Sam's father had made an arrangement with Melton to check on him periodically, like a prison warden on rounds, but the sour motel owner didn't care much for the task and so rarely performed it. Reporting his exit and entry for laundry duty was on Sam, though, and distracted though he might seem these days, Sam knew his father would be spot-checking with Melton to ensure compliance. Still, it afforded him an hour, maybe two if the place was busy, outside of the house.

The regular washers at the coin laundry were seventy-five cents and the dryers were fifty. Usually Sam was only doing two loads, and Dad left the quarters for these on top of the chores list he wrote out each morning. Never more, never less. Most of Sam's ill-gotten gains from hitchhiking had been confiscated when Dad had found him in Flagstaff, but he did still have a little bit secreted away, a few stray dollars and change. It had been a job and a half to keep these caches hidden with Dad's luggage checks every forty-eight hours while they'd been at Caleb's—and nightly, of course, during the cross-country drive after—but it had become all the more important to Sam for that.

Two schools ago, he'd had a brief, one-sided acquaintanceship with a kid who'd seemed to latch onto Sam mainly for his being an outsider with a popularity rating as nil as his own. Dustin. Dustin Reeves. Dustin had sat next to Sam during every lunch period and told him, in a kind of relentless serial format, his complete life story. Childhood, nursery school, death of grandparents, parents' divorce, own recent suicide attempt, coordination of mother and father over the phone for whichever one of them had custody of Dustin on a given day to ascertain that his room was free of sharps, and how when he'd had oral surgery for early-erupting wisdom teeth his mom had shaken Percocet out for him one by one while explaining soberly that the bottle would remain in her keeping, but he could ask her for more any time. Her Miltown was always in a coffee mug at the back of the kitchen cabinet anyway, Dustin had said. Then he'd started eating his two-inch-thick peanut butter and jelly sandwich and had continued eating, one bite at a time, until the bell, at which point he'd swallowed, returned his tray, and not spoken again until the following lunchtime, when he'd sat back down and picked up the story right where he'd left off.

Watching his father examine the lining of his bag in a parody of boot camp bed check, or coming in from splitting Caleb's wood to find his underwear and paperbacks laid out on his bed like pieces of the guns when they cleaned them, was in the running for the most humiliating thing ever to happen to Sam. But despite his father's best efforts, he still had money. Petty, negligible sums that bought nothing he really wanted, but the great thing was having them.

They were running out, though. Today he'd brought along an extra fifty cents for the soda machine, and while the two washers with his family's clothes churned away, he studied the options. They were Coke, root beer, orange soda, grape soda, and Brisk. Sam waffled in front of the machine, drawing out the luxury of choice before eventually committing to orange.

The coin laundry kept its doors open and a wall-mounted fan blowing, and would have been hot even if there hadn't been three dryers going at the moment. These were unattended: the place was dead, no one around to people-watch. Outside was populated enough, but Sam had had his fill of staring at a lake he couldn't get in, so he let the heat envelop him and drank his soda, alternating small sips with hoovering up the little lines of orange that caught in the groove between the hole and the rim of the can. Slurp, suck, slurp, suck. Dean had shown him how to do this: to make a game out of making things last.

An old guy with long, stringy white hair came in carrying a basket full of clothes. Half of them were baby clothes; must've been a grandfather. He gave Sam a friendly smile and said, "Hiya, how're you."

Minutes ago Sam had wished there were someone to watch; now he found himself thoroughly irked at this customer who had every bit as much right to be here as he did invading his empty coin laundry. He looked away out the window. It was very sunny outside. Very bright, very hot, very blue.

"Hey, son? Your washer's stopped."

Sam shook himself. "Excuse me?"

"This your washer? It's done stopped."

Sam got up to inspect the washer the old guy had opened, presumably while looking for an empty one. He expected the man to move back, but he didn't, and Sam had to step into his space to look in.

Sure enough, the washer was dead mid-cycle. A scum of detergent suds and dirt floated on top of the water, still smelling faintly: Dean's work clothes. Sam's heart sank.

"Guess there's somethin' wrong with the machine," the man said cheerfully. He smelled of stale tobacco and the ends of his hair were yellow. The washer immediately next to him was full of Sam's other load, so he reached over Sam's head to open the lid of another and armpit-stink wafted down. "This one's free," he said.

Sam backed away, staring at the washer's coin slot and biting his lip. He'd have to start the wash load over again. That would cost seventy-five cents. Accounting for the cost of the dryers, he had zero cents. Or fifty, if he shoved all of the clothes into one and risked them coming out damp.

The man smiled again. He, like Tyler yesterday, was missing a tooth. "How much you need?"

"What?"

"For the washer." The man jingled coins in his pocket. "How much you need for the washer?"

Sam took another half-step backward.

Which was when old man Melton came stomping in, iron-gray comb-over damp with sweat. "You wanna tell me why I'm paying to cool off the great outdoors, Winchester? Your window's open with the A/C on. Thing drips on the sand behind the house when it runs, I can always tell. I'm doing your family a favor, you know."

"Can I borrow a quarter?" Sam asked quickly.

Melton looked at him like he looked at all things; to wit, like they were a personal affront. "You think I'm a bank or something?"

"Please? I can pay you right back, I've got it at home."

"Fine, fine. But leave that window open with the A/C going again and you'll be explaining to your daddy why there's a lot more than twenty-five cents extra on his bill."

Sam darted forward to take the quarter, warm from Melton's pocket, and started ladling wet clothes from the busted washer into the one next to it. The creepy old guy had pushed off to the pair of oversize washers in the far corner. "Thanks, Mr. Melton."

"I mean it about the window," the owner said, walking out the door.

"Yes, Mr. Melton."

The old guy loaded up his washer and left it to run unattended. By the time Sam wiped his palms, slippery with a residue of soap and dilute fecal matter, on his pants and returned to his Orange Crush, the can was warm. He raised it to his lips anyway only to splutter out a dead yellow jacket that had crawled in and drowned.

Great. Now he had an extra twenty minutes to wait and nothing to drink while he did. Somebody had farted, too. It took forever for the fan to clear out the smell of rotten eggs.

* * *

Sam couldn't help keeping a running mental comparison of Beulah County and Route 66. It wasn't that easy to point to any one thing as being so different in the two landscapes as to account for why the one had felt like freedom when the other felt like prison. Open skies, check; open skies, check. Sand, check; sand, check. Storms, check; storms, check. Flat, check; flat, check. The humidity here was something else, but both places had a lot of nothing on offer. Why had one brand of nothing tasted so much better?

Eventually he decided it was the pine trees. The pine trees and the color of the sand. Along Route 66, the sand was all these sunset colors, which shaded into dramatic red rocks on the horizon. Here the horizon was swallowed up in endless, identical pines, the sand between them a blinding white that threw the sun back in his eyes. And, of course, people had been thinner on the ground out west. Here the nothing was of a positive, dully peopled kind that pressed in close all around, while there, the nothing had been a great and spectacular vacuum that launched something inside him outward to fill it.

He'd felt that for the first time just west of Amarillo, coming down the onramp onto the interstate. The scenery had been nothing special, but watching the blank clutter of first the interchange, then the suburbs, then the outskirts of farm supply businesses fall away one by one like stages of a rocket had been mesmerizing anyway. Riding in a big rig was always a little bit thrilling, too: being up so high, feeling the engine's vibrations through the seat, the sense of mass behind.

That had been Sam's second ride. The first had been with a family traveling out of Goodnight in a Volkswagen Rabbit more duct tape than metal who hadn't spoken much English. He'd missed the bus he'd been traveling on during a bathroom break, Sam had told them, and his poverty-stricken grandmother in Amarillo had no car to come and fetch him.

At the bus station where he'd promised that this grandmother would be coming to fetch him, the family had given him a box of animal crackers and a Capri Sun. The look the young mother had speared him with as she'd tucked a five into his hand had said that she hadn't believed a word of it. Sam had watched their eldest daughter, a girl three years younger than Sam, pick up the youngest, a one-and-a-half-year-old shaped like a chicken nugget with googly eyes, when the latter had started to cry. The girl had held the baby with skinny, straining arms. Sam had nearly run for the pay phone right then and there.

But he hadn't. He'd gone outside instead, and there'd been this skyscraper sitting on the corner right first thing. Amarillo wasn't a huge place, but compared to Goodnight it was a metropolis and a half. By the time Sam had reached the skyscraper to have a look at it, there'd been these sort of classic, Southwest-y looking shops with tall façades beckoning around the corner. Those had turned out to be mundane and disappointing when he'd come close enough to see through their windows, but by then the smell of a real, live bakery had reached him, and before Sam knew it a couple hours' exploration had delivered him to a truck stop diner sitting on top of the big interchange, his moment of childish weakness long forgotten. It hadn't taken much to find someone headed west and spin him a story.

Over the idling of his rig, as Sam had fastened the overlarge seatbelt, the trucker had asked, "What's your name, son?"

Sam had blinked at him. Just once; not a long enough pause for the trucker to question it. "Will," he'd said.

Only after the syllable had passed his lips had all the implications of being able to utter it caught up with him. It was more than just being able to lie. It was that it had almost not been a lie at all. Out there, he'd had no name. No one had known; no one had cared. At night that knowledge had been terrifying, but during the day, when the sun drove the shadows from his mind and he flew along the open road from a vantage point he'd rarely known—the front seat—it had been exhilarating. And when once he'd pushed through the terror for a certain number of consecutive nights, there had been the wonder and power of finding out he could.

During those hours, reinventing himself had seemed not only achievable, but like it was already happening. One day, he'd be able to come back, and maybe it would be sooner than he'd imagined back when he'd been planning this.

A car had chosen that moment to cut them off, and the trucker had braked hard with a bowdlerized curse. Sam's open backpack had shot off the seat and onto the floor, half the items inside falling out along the way.

One of them had caught the trucker's eye. "Oh, golly, _Classics Illustrated!_ Where in the world'd you find one of them in this day and age?"

Sam had hastened to cram #108, _Knights of the Round Table_ back into the bag. "My friend gave it to me."

Dad hadn't picked the comic book up when he'd found Sam in Flagstaff. Presumably, the granite-faced rental manager had it now. Whatever. It had been dorky, anyway. And thinking his family, thinking things like what they were doing right now, had anything to do with knights or shining cities was even dorkier.

"Fast interval," Dad called over his shoulder. His feet slapped out a perfectly straight line down the sidewalk. "Dean, don't let him fall behind."

Sam gritted his teeth as Dad counted down _five, four, three, two, one_ and then he sprinted.

Well, _sprinted_ was an overstatement, but not by much. Dean had shot up three inches since his last birthday alone; and Dad, well. Dad was Dad. So when his father kicked it up a notch, and Dean kicked it up two, Sam had to run flat-out.

Dean's finger prodded hard in the small of Sam's back and he grunted, "Get the lead out."

Case in point.

Eventually Dad turned them around and returned to a normal pace. Sam slowed, breathing heavily, sweat funneling right down his butt crack and uncomfortably tickling his balls. Without the demands of sprinting, there was nothing to distract him from the blisters forming where his sneakers had recently run out of space, so instead of keeping his eyes nailed to his father's back, Sam turned to the scenery to keep his mind occupied.

There wasn't much scenery to begin with, and when he let himself look around, Sam could see all the locals and vacationers who were staring at them. Dad didn't make them sing chants in public, but there was nothing inconspicuous about a family of three doing PT down Main Street at peak dinner hour in a vacation town.

Trailer camp, trailer camp, motel, motel, motel. Go-Kart course, barbecue shack. Souvenir shop. Motel, motel, motel.

When they were coming up on the spangle of Goldston's, Sam knew they were more than halfway home. Up ahead, two young boys broke away from their slower-moving parents and ran shrieking and whooping toward the funfair gate. Sam decided to find something else to look at.

He remembered, suddenly, what that Tyler kid had said about where the youth group was. Sam peered into the darkness of the big lot opposite the amusement park and sure enough, he could make out a big, brick building set a ways back from the road. It was easy to miss, because the church itself wasn't lit up. This place spent the money only to illuminate its marquee sign, which read:

_JEWEL OF CHRIST MINISTRIES_  
_SUN 9 AM WORSHIP_  
_A 4-IN TONGUE CAN BRING A 6-FT MAN 2 HIS KNEES_  
_YOUTH GRP WED, SAT 1PM_

Tyler had been all right. Anyway, he'd gone out of his way to talk to Sam, which was more than could be said for any of his blood relatives.

When they made it back to home base, they took turns in the shower in descending order of age, but with everybody on the same three-minute limit. After that Sam fulfilled his last chores of the day, cooking dinner and furnishing rote responses to his father's rote inquiries, and then Dad went to his bedroom and Dean flipped on the TV and everybody got down to the business of pretending he didn't exist.

Sam stared at the ceiling. Dean had ceded the bedroom to him, more or less, claiming the living room for himself. Dad was holed up working, of course. Three Winchesters, three rooms.

The A/C unit was mounted over Sam's bed, which was good from a temperature point of view, and dripped condensation onto the blanket at intervals of about once every thirteen seconds, which was less good from a laundry point of view. The drippings always left behind a stain, and once he'd even found the same yellowish slimy stuff that plagued the bathroom growing on it. He'd paid his own money to run that particular washerload twice.

In Goodnight, Sam had occupied himself at moments like this by imagining what his new life was going to be like: the anonymous boys' home he'd find, the below-the-table jobs he'd eventually get, the little apartment he'd save up for, the ways he'd game the system. The adventures he'd have. In those mental pictures, the sky was always clear. He was free, and unafraid, and ended up in a future where he did something he was actually good at and had his own car. Sometimes he was rich. More usually not, as disbelief could only be suspended so far, but in all of his scenarios he was _important_. When he allowed himself to picture their reunion, Dean made fun of him for the car but was secretly impressed by the rest of it.

Well, none of that was any fun to think about now. All the pretty pictures were layered over with humiliation and disbelief at his own stupidity that he'd ever thought it was going to work, so he needed new things to daydream about, which was hard going when the only prospects were dying bloody or dying of boredom.

_YOUTH GRP WED, SAT 1PM._

Sam considered. It wasn't that he was exactly gung-ho to go get indoctrinated. First of all, even kids as uncool as Sam knew that Bible study was the dweebiest of all possible clubs; second, he still had a vivid recollection of that service by the lake, of the preacher raving to put Billy Graham to shame and that lady getting baptized. Of the weird, discomfiting look on her face when she stood up again.

But they'd been here a week, and even with the way the man was keeping himself shut away Sam could tell that whatever Dad was working on, he was only just warming up. Whatever Sam had done, his family couldn't keep him on lockdown forever. A church group might be dorky and would probably be boring, but there couldn't be much about it his father could actually _object_ to. And Dean might look askance, but it wasn't like Sam didn't know what his brother thought of him already.

* * *

Despite all his reasoning, Sam hadn't actually expected his father to say yes. Certainly not without an argument. It was plain Dean hadn't, either, and Sam got some satisfaction out of the way his brother ground his teeth. If Dean wanted to carry on looking at him like a slug that needed salting, fine. Sam could fend for himself. He had done for two weeks on the open road; that was more than Dean could say.

Given that, it was a little embarrassing when the church turned out to have a ten-foot-tall statue of Jesus out front that matched the ones in the Putt-Putt. He hadn't seen that the night before.

And it was extra-mortifying when Dean asked which entrance they were supposed to use to the church and Sam froze solid. There was a correct social order here, undoubtedly there was, but Sam didn't know it and by not knowing he was going to show everybody what a weirdo he was before he even got inside. It was no use protesting that the fundies were the weird ones when he was on their turf. He hated feeling like this, and he felt it often.

The problem was solved for him by the door opening to emit a man about his father's age in a short-sleeved button-down with very short, dark hair. "Can I help you boys?" he asked, looking from Sam to Dean and back.

Sam was immediately conscious of both his own appearance and of Dean's. "I'm here for the youth group?" he said, loathing himself for the way his voice hooked upward at the end.

But the words transformed the man's guarded expression into a welcoming one. "Why, hello! You must be Sam! Tyler told me about you, we're glad you're here. Come in, come in. And you are?"

"Not staying," said Dean, and Sam had known, he'd just _known_ Dean would find a way to embarrass him even here. "Somebody over eighteen runs this group, right?"

"That'd be me," said the man pleasantly.

"Awesome. Be ready to go at two-thirty," he told Sam. "See you, padre." And, having scraped Sam off the bottom of his shoe, he left.

"Rick Davis," said the pastor, proffering his hand. Sam tried to match his shake in firmness and formality. "You can call me Pastor Rick, everybody does."

"Sam Winchester." It seemed better not to mention Dean.

"Well, I just came out to meet the pizza delivery, but I can see they aren't here yet." Something over Sam's shoulder caught Pastor Rick's eye and he paused. Sam turned to see what he was looking at: Dean, making a beeline for a girl who was leaning against the Goldston's fence. Figured. Pastor Rick's expression darkened for a moment before he plastered his smile back on and ushered Sam through the door. "Let's get you settled and introduced to the others, and lunch should be here in no time."

Sam followed him down a dim corridor to one of those low-ceilinged banquet halls. Folding tables were set out, some with folding chairs around them, two laden with stacks of paper plates and bottles of soda. Around twenty kids and a couple of church ladies with creases behind their knees were inside.

"Everybody please welcome Sam!" Pastor Rick had a voice that carried easily over the chatter. "He's new in town."

Kids of both sexes looked up. Four of them Sam recognized. Tyler grinned and waved from beside the other cyclists, who sat at one end of a table in a knot. Two of the others looked back neutrally, sipping Dixie cups of soda. The slightly older one, Nathaniel, pinned him with a stare.

"Hi," Sam said awkwardly.

There was a general chorus of _Hi, Sam_ s. A rounded girl of eight or nine with a sunburn and freckles shot to her feet. "Welcome to Jewel of Christ Ministries, where the Holy Spirit lives, we're glad you're here, Jesus loves you." She said this in a single breath and then sat back down.

"Thank you, Holly," Pastor Rick said cheerfully. He led Sam up to the boys and patted Tyler on the back. "Looks like maybe you'll be getting your Silver Fishhook this summer," he told him, and Tyler blushed with a gap-toothed smile. "I'll be back with pizza!" 

Tyler shifted over one seat, leaving Sam with a chair between him and the big kid who thought Sam talked funny. Gingerly, Sam took it. "This is Daniel," said Tyler of the big kid, "and this is Jordan," referring to the short one with the buzz cut, "and this is Eric," indicating a tan boy with inscrutable cow-eyes, who was new to Sam. "And this is Nathaniel," Tyler finished. This last was the older boy with the rat tail.

Sam remembered Nathaniel: he'd called him a liar.

One by one the boys nodded their greetings, except for Nathaniel, who surprised Sam by reaching a hand across the corner of the table. "We're glad you're here," he said, echoing Holly and the pastor.

Sam shook with him. Nathaniel's grip was tight, squeezing Sam's knuckles into each other and sparking pain on the up-down, but just on the side where Sam couldn't tell if it was on purpose. The boy's face, pleasantly neutral, gave nothing away. Sam kept his own expression in exactly the same mold and dug his thumb into the space housing Nathaniel's radial nerve. He let go immediately.

The girl who'd greeted Sam earlier bounced up and sat in the chair opposite Sam, next to Eric. She had on a pink t-shirt with butterflies picked out in glitter. The front of it said, in looping, sparkly cursive, _Jesus Died for You._ "Hi, I'm Holly."

"Yeah, I—I heard. Nice to meet you."

"Are you a Christian, Sam?"

"Uh," said Sam.

"I am," she said, and Tyler opened his mouth only to shut it again, with the glum expression of someone used to being interrupted. "Ever since two summers ago. I mean, I was a Christian before then, but Pastor Rick and my mom and dad made me wait until I was seven to get baptized since it's real important to understand what it means to give your whole life to Jesus."

"I guess I can see why that would be good."

"When I was _real_ little I didn't want to be, I thought church was boring and stupid, but then my cousin Bethany, she said that when she was eleven, she got saved, and she stopped stealing and wearing makeup and got baptized in an inflatable pool down by the speedway and I could just see she was real happy after that, so I started thinking I wanted more out of life, you know?"

"Sort of?"

"Holly, do you _ever_ stop?" asked Daniel.

"Let us not grow weary of doing good,' Daniel," she snapped.

"The Bible doesn't say you have to talk all the time."

"It doesn't say you can't."

"'Let your words be few,'" said Nathaniel quietly. "Ecclesiastes 5:2."

Holly instantly shut up. She was annoying and hyper, and definitely nuts, but when she started studying her hands on the table, Sam still felt kind of bad for her.

"Who's hungry?" Pastor Rick called out, carrying in a giant stack of pizza boxes.

The smell sent Sam's salivary glands into overdrive and imposed an instant ceasefire on any theological discussions. Pastor Rick and the church ladies started laying the boxes out on the tables, flipping them open to reveal the hot, fragrant disks within. Sam itched to reach out and take, but every other person in the room, including ones younger than him, very conspicuously wasn't. He might have tried to talk to Tyler and his friends, but there was an equally conspicuous lack of conversation in the room. He couldn't figure out what everybody was waiting for until Pastor Rick clapped his hands and said, "Who will practice leadership by saying grace?"

Holly's hand shot into the air.

Pastor Rick scanned the room, passing right over Holly's straining fingertips as if they were invisible. He did stop on Sam's end of the table, though. "Nathaniel?" The pastor smiled.

Ducking his head shyly, Nathaniel extracted himself from his folding chair. Sam watched him with a certain amount of skepticism: shy people didn't shake hands like that.

At the front of the room, Nathaniel cleared his throat. He was slightly built, with a pointy nose, lots of freckles, and very long eyelashes. "Lord, we thank you for these gifts and thank you for this fellowship," he began. Heads bowed over folded hands and pepperoni. "Thank you for the chance to hear your Word and study it and for us bein' all together here in the light of the Lord, friends and strangers alike. Please bless us as we partake of this bounty. Amen."

"Amen," Pastor Rick echoed. "All right, everybody, dig in! Spirit Challenge starts in twenty!" He gave Nathaniel a fatherly pat as the latter moved in the direction of bounty with extra cheese.

One of the church ladies came to fetch Holly, who apparently belonged at the girls' table, and Tyler helped Sam fill his paper plate with the diligence of a host. Sam leaned in and whispered, "What do we actually do?"

"Oh!" Tyler perked up a bit. "That's easy. It's the Spirit Challenge today. We answer questions about Scripture and stuff; we have it once a month. The top three kids can go to the regional challenge, and if they do good there, state and then national in the fall." He pointed at a leaderboard propped against the far wall, half-hidden behind a stack of chairs. "Nathaniel always wins," he said, a little wistfully. "He wants to be a preacher when he grows up."

After the wreckage of the pizza had been cleared away, Pastor Rick stood at the front of the room with a stack of cards and flipped a coin. "Looks like the first question goes to our Missionettes," he said, turning to the girls' table to ask, "Who were Adam and Eve's sons?"

A few hands went up, but one was by far the fastest.

"Holly?"

"Cain and Abel."

"No." Pastor Rick made a mark on a sheet he held. "Leah?"

Across from Sam, Nathaniel mouthed the answer along with the girl who stood up next: _Cain, Abel, and Seth._

"That's right. Very good, Leah." Smattering of applause. "All right, gentlemen, you ready?" The boys at Sam's table cheered. "Sam, do you want to play with us?"

The sudden attention caught Sam off guard. "Can I just watch for now?"

"Sure," the pastor said. "Boys: which two trees grew in the Garden of Eden?"

The Spirit Challenge went on in this way. Sam was surprised to see Nathaniel encouraging the others to put their hands up more than he volunteered himself—surprise tinged with the annoyance that came when it looked like one might have misjudged somebody. Somehow Nathaniel always ended up being the one who moved up the leaderboard, though.

"Good spiritual leadership," Pastor Rick praised him.

At last the final question was announced. Since the girls had started, the boys would finish. "The Parable of the Lost Sheep says that a true shepherd will leave ninety-nine sheep who are safe already to search for just one who's lost," Pastor Rick read out. "Which book of the Bible tells this parable?"

As had happened on a few occasions, Daniel looked at Eric, and Eric looked at Jordan, and Jordan looked at Tyler, and Tyler looked slightly panicked, and only after a few seconds of silence and nobody else doing it, Nathaniel meekly put his hand into the air.

"Go ahead, Nathaniel."

"The Book of John." The answer was prompt, quiet, and confident.

Pastor Rick paused. "Sorry, no."

Nathaniel didn't say or do anything, or even perceptibly move his face, yet he looked like he'd been slapped.

"Anybody else?" Pastor Rick asked.

The boys all looked at each other in confusion. Sam was watching Nathaniel, so he saw the minute tic in his jaw. Very slowly, Sam put his hand up.

"Yes, Sam?"

The whole room, which had fallen into a comfortable forgetfulness of Sam's existence, had its eyes on him now—Nathaniel included. Well, this kid might be the Bible trivia champion or whatever, but Sam lived in motels.

"The Lost Sheep is Matthew. John is the Good Shepherd."

Pastor Rick blinked. "That's exactly right."

Tyler let out a little whoop; he reined it in quickly with a glance at Nathaniel, but the rest of the room, led by the church ladies, was applauding. Holly beamed like a lighthouse.

"All right, that's it for today's Challenge. Everybody help clear up, please! Helping hands!"

The kids all moved to obey. While Sam and the others were carrying their folded chairs to the rack in the corner, Pastor Rick came up. He clapped Sam on the shoulder with one hand, and Nathaniel with the other.

"Good Scripture knowledge, both of you!" he said. "Looks like Sam here is going to give you a run for your money, Nathaniel."

Tyler looked proud, like a talent scout who'd made good. Sam turned pink. These people were weird. Straight-up weird, and the pastor along with the rest of them. Given that, he didn't know why the words left him so pleased.

Nathaniel's lips pressed together, and the skin around his eyes went tight.

* * *

"We haven't done any training for a long while," Dad said the next night. "It's past time. Suit up."

_Suit up_ was an awfully impressive term for _put your shoes on,_ but that was John Winchester for you.

There had always been family rituals: runs together, shooting at cans (and then straws, and then animals, and then paper outlines shaped like people), Dad's tendency to refer to beds as bunks and bathrooms as heads, etc. At a certain point, though, Dad had stopped trying to sell these to Sam and Dean as being fun and had started telling them that they were merely important instead.

Of course, Sam had asked why. _A man should know how to defend himself,_ that had been his father's first answer. Sam had accepted it, for a while.

_Because Dad said so_ had been Dean's answer from day one and hadn't changed since. Sam halfway appreciated the consistency, but it had been by watching Dean that Sam had worked out that all of Dad's answers were lies in the first place.

Sam's stomach knotted when Dad led them down the driveway of the very closed, very privately owned ATV rental place just a few lots down from the church. Dad was good at this sort of thing, of course—trespassing without getting caught. He was good at talking his way out when he did get caught, too. But he wasn't perfect, and Sam had visions of Tyler, Daniel, Jordan, Eric, and Nathaniel showing up on their bikes to ask, _Your family steal Go-Karts for a living or something?_ He kept his mouth shut, though. Protesting would only make it worse.

Dad stopped, turned to them, and did that thing where he waited for them to stand at attention before he started talking. "You're hunting something. Your brother's injured, maybe unconscious. You can't leave him where he is; it's not safe. How are you going to move him?"

Sam's stomach sank. His stomach was getting more PT than any other part of him, probably.

He'd learned how to do fireman carries about two months after he confirmed his suspicion that John Winchester was not, in fact, in sales. Of course, Sam had already been training beside his family for years before he ever understood why, but that day—his first time lifting his brother bodily—had felt different. Lots of families went shooting; not usually with handguns, but still. Sparring and wrestling could be explained away as being like the karate lessons other kids got, just adapted for life on the road. There weren't a lot of ways to explain learning how to carry someone's unconscious body other than as preparation for them to need it some day, though.

At first, that had been precisely what made it exciting to Sam. This was real. This was serious. This meant that Dad and Dean expected him to take his place at their sides. Except that weeks had gone by, then months, then a year, and the only thing that had changed was that Dad took Dean with him more often and left Sam alone. Excitement sure as hell wasn't what he felt now.

First came the awkward, impotent fun of being lifted; then it was his turn to do the lifting. Dad barked corrections to his form, pulled his body impatiently this way and that, and then Sam bent, swiveled, and stood up with his brother on top of him through a burn he felt straight down his hamstrings. He watched his knockoff Converse sink fractionally into the sand.

Their father paced a circle around them and slapped Sam over the stomach. "Gut tight."

Sam clenched his abdominals.

"When you're ready." Dad was walking backwards to mark the distance for Sam to cover, nice, big steps. "Don't rush it."

Easy for him to say.

Dean started sniping three steps in, giving Sam shit about being out of condition like he'd just carried more than his own bodyweight over twenty yards. Sam shot back, getting more and more pissed. There was no _point_ to this. He was plodding down the track with Dean's hip blocking his ear, Dean's elbow smashed into one nostril and Dean's waistband into the other, and Dean's side-sweat running into his eyes and it was pointless. It was pointless, his brother hated him, Sam wished he'd never been born, Dean thought it would be a good idea to give the guy carrying his sorry ass five feet off the ground a wedgie and that was fucking it.

Sam knew he'd pay for dumping Dean on the ground, but in the moment, he didn't care. They glared at each other, and Sam put every ounce of loathing he'd ever felt for his brother, for his father, for the way they lived, and for exercises in humiliation like _this_ into it.

But he hadn't expected Dean to be able to read it, somehow, and it was shocking when he did. "You hate this so much, what the hell were you always riding us to let you play for? Huh?" Dean spoke in a low, rapid-fire undertone. "You weren't even supposed to _know._ That journal's like the most private thing he has, he never goes anywhere without it, and you stole it like a fucking sneak. Now you wanna cry about it. So drop me, then. Not like you weren't waiting for a chance to all along."

The words hit Sam like a paddle to carpet, driving the thoughts and emotions he had been seething with out all at once. He stared. He knew by the curl of Dean's lip that his brother had misunderstood the source of his shock, but he had no time to do anything about it before their father was on them.

"Get up," Dad told Dean. To Sam he said, "Do you think this is a game?"

His father's eyes, beard, and hair were curiously flat in the moonlight. Sam stared like he'd never seen him before. "Do you?"

"Why'd you drop your brother, Sam?"

Clarity and detachment had replaced Sam's fury, like this was all happening to someone else, or was a memory already. "He's heavier than I am. You're making both of us do it like it's the same thing, and it's not. It's not fair."

"So what?"

There was the ground yanked out from under Sam's feet again.

Dad took them to the bridge. When Sam understood what Dad was expecting them to do, first he was numb, then he was angry, then a strange combination of both. The smell and shape and movement of his brother were all crowded in too close for Sam to get at his own feelings. Anyway, it was hard to feel any emotion the same way he was used to while upside-down with his ass in the air, like the change in physical perspective called everything else into question.

Dean made noises as he climbed, short, punched-out little grunts like he was digging the effort out of his chest. The air hit the top of Sam's thigh as he did it, over and over, rhythmic.

Pause. Very careful readjustment. Sam made himself malleable, let Dean cinch his knee in closer to his wrist.

He wished that Dean would drop him, but of course he never did.

At the top, Sam felt the Dean's heavy breathing through the shoulder dug into his gut for a few seconds before Dean actually let him down onto the platform. Dad didn't even tell Dean good job. He just turned and went back down, expecting his sons to follow. Dean's gait was visibly rubbery.

Dean tried to argue for him. "Dad, he's too small. Maybe he should do it with something else." Sam wanted to hit him.

Anyway, Dad wasn't having it, so it hardly mattered. Dean was fourteen now. Training saw to it that he had more muscle mass than most kids his age; but Sam had caught Dean flexing in the bathroom mirror enough times to know he was nowhere near as tall, ripped, or imposing as he would have liked to think. He was older and he was taller and he'd kissed girls (or claimed to), but he was still just a kid. Sam had lifted him once tonight. He could do it again now.

He did do it again now. Dean helped, and Sam hated him for it.

"Suck in that gut, Sam." Their father walked backwards up the bridge.

Sam made it six steps. Dean cried out in pain, but Sam heard it distantly because the impact drove the wind straight out of him. For a second his sympathetic nervous system delivered him over to blind physiological panic; hands yanked him up to sitting and shoved his head toward his knees, and air came rushing in again. Sam coughed; Dean's hand gripped his neck tightly for a second before it—and he—was gone.

"That'll do for tonight." Dad was here already. Of course he was. "Dean, let's—"

"Starfish." Sam's throat hurt.

"Don't be an idiot," Dean told him.

Sam pulled him down over his shoulders and pushed to his feet.

He faced the bridge. He half expected his father to set Dean on his feet again and read Sam the riot act, but Dad just walked back up to the top and watched them silently, like this had been his plan all along.

Who knew, maybe it had been.

The burn was there from the first step this time, no grace period. Dean's breath hit the side of his ribcage, warm and uneven. One. Two.

Dean thought Sam had taken the journal because he wanted to know about monsters. That was wrong. Yes, he'd wanted to know their own position, what was really out there in the dark and, by extension, the basic nature of the world. Who didn't? But what had made him look was simpler, pettier, and more basic: he'd just wanted to know who his father really was. It had felt like it was his business.

Three. "This is stupid," Dean said. "Put me down so we can all go home."

The bridge was made of logs stacked widthwise on a frame, with a covering of sand and clay worn thin by ATV tires. Sam curled his toes into the divots between each log, pushed off from the roundness of them.

"Just drop me already." Dean's words hit Sam the same place his breath did, against the skin between his sixth and seventh ribs. "You didn't have any problem doing it before."

The truth was, Sam had been sick of being treated like an idiot. He'd been sick of being left behind. He'd pick his brother's pillow up when Dean was out of the room and look at the gun there, and he'd feel alone and lower than dirt; it was frightening to be stuck with someone the keep-a-gun-under-his-pillow kind of frightened, but he never would have run away over it. The opposite. But it wasn't like Sam could've told Dean, _I read it because I want to see whatever you see._

"Put me down, Sam. Stop."

He never knew what went wrong. All he knew was that one moment he was struggling up the hill, and the next he wasn't anymore. Dean rolled out of the way with practiced ease.

"That's enough for now," Dad said when he got there. "Keep it down on the way out."

Sam lay flat on his face. Dean sat a few feet away and Sam could feel him looking, like he was going to say something, but he didn't.

They walked rather than ran the mile and a half home after that, and Sam was permitted to fall in behind his father and brother. For half an hour, he had an uninterrupted view of their backs, Dean's neck bare, Dad's with the beaded aluminum chain to his dog tags.

Dean was wrong about why Sam had taken the journal, but he was right about one thing: John Winchester never went anywhere without it. Except that the week before Christmas in 1992, he had.

* * *

The next morning, Dean hobbled like an old man and Sam almost fell on his face the first time he tried to get out of bed. He went back there as soon as Dad and Dean were both gone, anyway; covered the windows and curled up under the blanket and lay, not really sleeping but not doing anything else, until he was in danger of Dean getting home and catching him like that. At that point, he had to go out and linger in the common areas long enough to get checked off Dean's to-do list. While he waited for his brother to get home, Sam wiped the day's harvest of yellow gunk off the bathroom faucet. Sam'd read in a _Scientific American_ once that slime mold could solve mazes. Maybe that was how this stuff kept finding its way to him.

When Dean got in—stripped down to his boxers, his farm clothes already being in the Hefty bag for Sam to wash tomorrow—he kept looking at Sam, sidelong glances before he got in the shower and hesitating ones after. To hell with it, Sam decided. He'd been seen long enough. He went back to the bedroom and curled up on top of the blanket, staring out a nail hole in the wall. After a minute, _The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air_ came on in in the living room.

Ultimately, the only comment made on the previous evening's exercises was that PT that night was only a single-mile jog.

The phone rang that night while Dean was taking an extra shower (gross) and Dad was shut up in the bedroom. Expecting it to be for either his father or his brother, Sam picked up the phone and the notepad kept beside it simultaneously. "Hello?"

"This is Tyler Eddy, may I speak to Sam, please?"

"Tyler?" Sam was too surprised to say anything cleverer than that.

"Hi, Sam!" It was bizarre to hear anyone sound that happy to hear him. Bizarre and nice. "Are you coming to youth group tomorrow?"

Sam hesitated. In truth, he hadn't really enjoyed the one on Wednesday. He'd looked forward to it as the one bright spot in his week and his first opportunity in a month to spend time around people who didn't know what he'd done, but when he'd got there, it had been the kind of weird where he'd been too obviously out of place to have much fun. And Dean had made his disgust with the whole thing clear.

On the other hand, Dean had made his disgust with the whole thing clear, and at least there'd been pizza.

"Yeah," Sam said on impulse. "I am."

"Cool! My mom said to ask if you want a ride. We can pick you up so you don't have to walk."

Sam, who had learned the term _lactic acid fermentation_ in health class last year but had not known its meaning until this morning, said, "Yes, please."

After he hung up the phone, he looked at it for a long moment.

He knocked on his father's door. Paper rustled for several seconds and a closet shut before the door opened and his father looked down at him, incongruously barefoot on the carpet. Sam picked up his chin and said, "I want to go to the youth group tomorrow."

Since hanging up the phone, he'd been playing out scenarios in his mind where his father tried to deny him, and Sam countered with the words that kept straining inside him like an Alien chest-burster: _I know you wanted me to find it._ And this would be as much as to say: _Check. Your move._ What happened next varied from scenario to scenario. In some, Dad turned pale and said nothing; in others, he reddened with fury and slammed the door in Sam's face.

But all Dad actually said was, "That's fine. Did you make sure Dean can take you?"

"I can get a ride with Tyler and his mom."

It was clear Dad liked this part less. A stranger, even an adult, wasn't worth much in his eyes. But again he said, "All right. Understand that I'm trusting you with this. Same deal as last week: she doesn't leave if there's no adult when you get there, and you don't leave until Dean arrives to pick you up."

_You mean for the prisoner transfer?_ Sam tactfully did not say.

Tyler was picking him up at 12:45 on Saturday, so at 12:30, Sam was sitting in the living room, chores done, watching old man Melton rake litter off the sand out the window. Rake, rake, pause, nose-scratch. Sam picked at the hem of his shorts.

At 12:38, Sam noticed a bead of that yellow stuff growing on the bottom edge of the living room A/C unit. He sprang up to wipe it with a wad of toilet paper, then settled down on the couch again. Rake, rake, rake. Pick. Melton bent to collect his garbage bag full of ice cream wrappers and cigarette butts and wandered away.

At 12:47, a teal minivan rolled to a stop in front of the window. Sam was off the couch and out the door in seconds.

The driver's window rolled down while the passenger door rolled open, and there was Mrs. Eddy smiling the smile of one who baked cookies for Little League teams, and Tyler waving and grinning madly, even more than he had when Sam had turned up at the church.

"Hop on in!" Mrs. Eddy called.

Sam scooted into the space on the backseat Tyler scooted out of, dutifully fastening his seatbelt as they began to back out. "Thanks for coming," Tyler said excitedly, like Sam was doing him a personal favor instead of the other way around.

"Thanks for the ride."

The teal seats were heavily dusted with black and white hair. Sam thought about asking what kind of dog he had: if Dad was letting him go to church youth groups, it wasn't out of the bounds of possibility that he'd let Sam go over to a friend's house. Was Tyler a friend? He could be. But his throat closed up. He didn't want someone else's dog. He never wanted a dog again.

"So, Sam," said Mrs. Eddy, "where's your family from?"

By car, the distance between Melton's trailer and the church was negligible, and Tyler's mom filled the time by peppering him with the standard questions asked of new kids by welcoming parents everywhere. Sam gave his rehearsed answers, and before she had a chance to get to "What's your favorite subject at school?" they were drawing to a halt at the church's side door, which stood open.

When Sam and Tyler walked into the banquet hall, Pastor Rick and the church ladies were setting out flags: an American flag and a white one Sam didn't recognize, both in homemade wooden flag-holders of the sort used in Scout meetings. Unlike when Scout meetings displayed the national and state standards, both of these flags were set at an equal height.

"All right, everybody, let's say our Pledges! Lots to do today, let's get started!"

Tyler and all the kids in the room snapped into position in a semicircle around the flags, boys on one side, girls on the other. Sam fitted himself awkwardly between Tyler and another kid—who turned out to be Nathaniel. If Nathaniel had even noticed Sam, he gave no sign.

Pastor Rick placed his right hand over his heart. "I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America…."

Sam relaxed. This was familiar enough.

"…with liberty and justice for all."

The pastor cleared his throat. One of the church ladies sidled over to smooth the folds of the other flag, and Sam could finally see what it was. It was white. Like the American flag, it had a blue rectangle in the upper left quadrant, but instead of fifty white stars, it had a single red cross. Everyone else put their right hands back over their hearts. Sam stood awkwardly with his hands by his sides.

"I pledge allegiance to the Christian Flag," said the room in unison, "and to the Savior for Whose kingdom it stands: one brotherhood, uniting all Christians in service and life."

Sam felt eyes on him, but when he glanced to his side, Nathaniel was looking straight ahead at the flags and seemed wholly absorbed.

Next Pastor Rick went to a lectern behind the flags and held up a Bible that sat there. Sam expected him to read something out of it, but nobody had taken their hands off of their hearts, and Sam found himself putting his own up there and half-mouthing along with the words in an attempt to disappear into the wall of kids reciting:

"I pledge allegiance to the Bible, God's Holy Word. I will make it a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path, and I will hide its words in my heart that I might not sin against God."

That seemed to be all. People took their hands off their hearts and kids bolted for the soda.

"Hey, hey, whoa," said Pastor Rick. He wasn't really shouting, but he had excellent projection. "Where's our helping hands? I need six good witnesses helping Miss Claire and Miss Nancy right now!"

Sam wasn't sure what he was supposed to be witnessing, but handing out paper plates would at least give him something to do with himself. "Uh—should we help?" he asked Tyler.

"Oh! Sure."

Tyler was actually kind of quiet—in general, not at this specific moment. Despite being a native here, he gave off a lost air, as if, like Sam, he wasn't totally sure what he was supposed to be doing. It was somehow both reassuring and slightly off-putting.

They ended up in a line of kids queued up to help, with Nathaniel in front of them and Holly behind them. Holly tapped on Sam's shoulder. "Hi, Sam."

"Hi, Holly."

She seemed shy all of a sudden. "God's just… God's just telling me that you're on His mind, and He has special plans for you."

Sam wasn't sure what to say in this situation. He snuck a glance at Tyler, who looked sort of resigned. On the one hand, if group consensus was that Holly was a kook, Sam tended to agree; on the other hand, it struck him as rich coming from a group of people who said a Pledge of Allegiance to a made-up flag with a cross on it. He got handed a stack of paper plates before he had to reply.

The conversation was pretty normal while they were eating pizza. Jordan showed off a genuine Hacky Sack and promised to let them all have a try with it later; Eric described a deer carcass he'd found on the side of the road. If Holly was still talking about God throughout the meal, the girls were the ones who had to put up with it.

"All right, guys, got some news items here," Pastor Rick called once a couple slices of pizza were pushing comfortably-uncomfortably at Sam's stomach from the inside. He scanned a clipboard at the front of the room; everybody listened in a starch-coma. "Right up top: congratulations to Nathaniel, who will not only go to Fayetteville for the regional Spirit Challenge next month, but has been selected to give a youth sermon while he's there!"

The pastor led a round of applause that the church ladies took up until everybody else did. Most kids chewed pizza crusts blank-faced at the news, though some of the older girls showed a bit more interest. Nathaniel ducked his head and turned very pink.

When the applause tapered off, Pastor Rick asked, "Have you given any thought to what you want to preach about, Nathaniel?"

Nathaniel twisted in his seat to face the pastor, who'd come over. "Yeah, uh, I'm thinking I'm gonna preach on Matthew chapter six." He spoke like it was just for Pastor Rick, although the rest of them could hear him. "And about how I had trouble trusting God's plan for my life after my dad died in Desert Storm."

No one else seemed startled by this information, but Sam was. 

Pastor Rick smiled down on Nathaniel. "Well, he'd be real proud of you."

Everybody else had gone back to eating and talking; the conversation was pretty much just Nathaniel and Pastor Rick at this point. "How's your mom doing?" the pastor asked.

"She's okay; you know. Fourth of July's hard. But we pray about it and that helps."

Pastor Rick gave his shoulder a squeeze. "You're gonna be a real spiritual leader one day," he told Nathaniel quietly. "All right, everybody, today's a merit badge meeting," he called to the rest of the room. "Girls can stay here; boys, throw your trash away and, follow me!"

A herd migration started. The corridor was dim, and Sam automatically threw his senses outward. He caught Daniel's voice from somewhere: "—my brother Mark works with him. Says he's trouble."

"What's he doin' with the pastor's—?"

"Make a line!" Pastor Rick called.

Sam stood alert, listening for more of the conversation, but everyone was silent now. In the light let in by the little window in the door, he couldn't see Daniel's silhouette in front of him, so he must have been behind. The second voice he couldn't be sure of. It was probably nothing, anyway.

"As we walk into the woods," said Pastor Rick, "remember to think of it as a spiritual journey into the wilderness, all right?"

They went outside, walked through a gap in the hedge behind the church, and stood in a clearing with an access road running through it. The Goldston's ferris wheel was visible in this particular wilderness.

Pastor Rick set down a large plastic bin and consulted a xerox on the lid. "Today's reading is from Matthew, chapter five," he said. "Settle in, boys, settle in."

Sam sat on the ground next to Tyler and hoped they weren't on top of a fire ant colony.

Pastor Rick read from the xerox. "'You have heard that it was said, "You shall not commit adultery." But _I_ tell you'"—He stabbed a finger into the air.—"'that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away!'" He mimed this, suddenly and violently enough that the boys around Sam all flinched. "'It is better for you to lose one part of your body than to be thrown into Hell. And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away.'" No miming this time. The oldest boy in the group, a twelve-year-old named Scott, turned pink. "'It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into Hell.'"

Pastor Rick lowered his paper and looked at them. Some of the boys squirmed. Several struggled to keep straight faces. "You boys don't think this passage applies to you," said the pastor. "You're too young, right? Most of you still think girls have cooties." That did get a ripple of laughter. "And you're right! It's gonna be a while before most of you need to worry about the specific sin Jesus is talking about here. But all of God's Word has a message for everyone, and this passage isn't just about adultery: it's about purity. So we're gonna talk about what that is here today."

From the bin, Pastor Rick produced toy fishing rods with little magnets for hooks. He handed them to Nathaniel, who handed them to everybody else. While the kids untangled the poles' strings, Pastor Rick set index cards on the ground in the middle of the circle. Each one had a magnet taped to the back and a smiling fish drawn on it in magic marker.

"All right, fishermen, ready? One… two… three… go!"

There was a general scrum as everyone jammed their rods into the middle of the circle, flicking the magnetic hooks over the cards and tangling the lines together. Sam hesitated on the periphery, unsure of where to insert himself into the vortex of Fisher Price. Feeling eyes on him, he glanced up. Nathaniel was looking straight at him. Sam angled his rod down beneath the others until his magnet clicked. Writing flashed on the bottom of the card as he reeled it in.

A couple minutes of laughter and chaos later, each of them had a card. "Okay, now, let's see what you caught. One at a time, clockwise around the circle. Josh, go ahead."

The boy to Sam's left began: "'Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.' Matthew 5:8."

Next: "'And everyone who has this hope fixed on Him purifies himself, just as He is pure.' 1 John 3:3."

Next: "Now the works of the flesh are evident: immorality, impurity, sensuality'"—The boy reading struggled with the word.—"'idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, conflict, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, disagreements, divisions, envy, drunkenness, debauchery, and things like these. Those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God."

Sam felt ants crawling under the backs of his thighs.

"'Who may ascend unto the hill of the Lord?'" read out the boy next to Tyler, who was next to Sam. "'And who may stand in His holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who has not offered up his soul to falsehood and has not sworn deceitfully.' Psalm 24:3-4."

Tyler turned over his card. "'To the pure, all things are pure; but to those who are defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure, but both their mind and their conscience are defiled.' Titus 1:15."

Sam's turn. In blue ballpoint someone had written, "'Who can make the clean out of the unclean? No one!'" He swallowed. "Job 14:4."

The boys looked at each other. Sam sat with his fingers knotted tightly in the crabgrass.

Pastor Rick broke the silence "What is God trying to tell us about purity?"

The oldest boy put his hand in the air. "That it's real important to Him?"

"Yeah. Yeah, Scott, it is. But why? What"—Pastor Rick laughed a little.—"what is purity? Or maybe I should ask: what is _impurity?_ Is it something we do with our bodies?"

They all shifted uncomfortably. Sam was perfectly aware of what sex was; Dean had been sharing his dirty magazines pretty much since he'd first scrounged them, and regaling Sam with tales of romantic prowess that Sam was about 99.99% sure were total bullshit, though there was always that last sliver of doubt. Anyway, if the other kids here were anything like he was, most of them were starting to find things to do in the bathroom other than pee, even if it was mostly theoretical at this point. "Yes?" Jordan ventured, immediately flaming red to the roots of his buzz cut.

"Well, yes, it can be, but not just that. Who's got Galatians?" The boy who'd struggled over _sensuality_ handed Pastor Rick his card. "Here we go: 'Now the works of the _flesh_ are evident'—so there's our bodies, but it goes on to list, let's see: hatred, conflict, jealousy, rivalries. Anger. Who has Psalm 24? Thanks. Listen carefully, now: 'He who has clean hands,' there's the body again, 'and a pure _heart,_ who has not offered up his _soul_ to _falsehood_ and has not sworn deceitfully.'" The pastor looked around the circle. "How do you suppose God feels about lies?"

Sam's heart beat fast.

"Tyler, you've got Titus, right? 'To those who are defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure, but both their mind and their conscience are defiled.' How does that sound? Does that sound like a good way to get into Heaven to you?"

Sam could see the other kids trading glances out the corner of his eye, but he didn't look at any of them. He felt sick. Resentment cut through the queasiness, but couldn't dispel it. He didn't even go here. He didn't believe what these people believed; he barely believed in God, never mind the Bible, and he wished he'd never been stupid enough to come. He wished he could just get up and leave, but he couldn't do that without admitting to his father and brother that coming had been stupid in the first place.

Pastor Rick plunked down onto the sand beside them and produced a stick of Wrigley's from his shirt pocket. He unwrapped it, showed it around the circle, raised his eyebrows, and popped it in his mouth. He chewed exaggeratedly until the group gave up a few chuckles. Then he plucked the wad of gum from his mouth and held it out to them. "Okay, who wants it?"

They all recoiled, laughing—even Sam, despite the bad feeling in the pit of his stomach.

Pastor Rick squinted at the gum. "Hey, look, it's got a bit of pizza in it."

The group laughed harder. Tyler shoved Sam's shoulder, grinning, and Sam cracked a smile back. Even Nathaniel did, blushing and toying with a tuft of grass.

"Now, just so you know, some pastors? They _would_ make you chew this gum. Every single one of you, one after another. But I'm not gonna, 'cause I'm a nice man." That got one more laugh out of the group. Pastor Rick balled the gum up in the wrapper and pocketed it again. "But imagine it! Imagine each of you had chewed this gum, all around this circle. Would any of you want to take it, if you knew where it had been?"

_No!_ s and theatrical gagging sounds and _gross_ es.

"Yeah, that's pretty bad. Nobody wants that. It's too intimate, right? That's a kind of contact that's only meant to happen once, with one person. I mean, it's got my food in it! _But."_

Grins faded in the pause after the conjunction.

"What if I told you that y'all aren't the mouth," said Pastor Rick. "What if I told you that you're the gum?"

Dead silence.

"See—your mind isn't like a mouth, or even like a stomach, half as much as it's like gum: it's sticky, it's soft, it's pliable. It can stretch into all _kinds_ of shapes." The last sentence was tinged with knowing humor. "And wicked thoughts? They're like pizza." A giggle. "It's true! Because wicked thoughts, they're sin, and sin is death, but they never _smell_ bad. They never _taste_ bad. Not at first. But later on, all that sin starts to pile up like unhealthy food, and what smelled so good just a little bit ago starts weighing you down."

Two slices of pizza and a cup of cola felt like an acidic bowling ball in Sam's stomach all of a sudden. He thought about trying to run PT right now and wished desperately to throw up.

"So don't let the Devil chew you, boys," Pastor Rick said softly. "'Cause he will, oh, he will. He'll chew you up and spit you out, and what's left of you… well. What's left _in_ you will stain your heart. And that's the part God cares about."

Pastor Rick laced his fingers together, braced his elbows on his knees, and rested his chin on his knuckles: a boyish pose in a circle of boys. "Two minutes' silent meditation now," he said. "For this meditation, I want you to think about a time you did something wrong. Specifically, I want you to think about what it did to your heart, while you were doing it and after you did it, and then I want you to think about what God wanted for you instead. Based on this passage from Matthew, what do you think Jesus would say if He was beside you right now?"

The silence stretched out. One of the boys sniffled about halfway through, a barely-there sound quickly hid. Sam's heart beat, rapid and prominent under his skin.

"All right." Pastor Rick stood, brushing off his trousers, and the boys followed them. Sam thought he saw Jordan dash a hand over his cheek, but he wasn't looking around to verify.

Emerging from the words, scant though they were, broke the spell; people began to talk again, and joke and shove. The church lot was narrow but long; there was a lot of parking lot to cross between them and the building. As they did so, a woman came hastening over the narrow strip of ground separating the church from the bungalows neighboring it. Pastor Rick immediately excused himself and strode to intercept her.

From their ages and postures as they spoke, Sam guessed she was his wife. He overheard, "She snuck out _again—"_

Jordan took out the Hacky Sack and toed it airborne. The empty parking lot made an ideal playing surface, and it took maybe five seconds flat to get a game going. Sam watched the pastor curiously for a few seconds, but forgot all about him when Jordan passed the sack to him. 

Other kids watched on the periphery; Nathaniel gazed absently off into the woods. Between Sam, Jordan, Eric, Daniel, and once even Tyler, they managed to keep the Hacky Sack off the ground for some unbroken minutes. Then a shot from Eric sent the footbag careening sideways. Sam dived and managed to scoop it up in the side of his shoe. The others whooped a, "Yeah, Sam!" and Sam switched feet to lob the thing with a toe-kick, true and hard and straight into Nathaniel's backside.

Nathaniel spun around, rat tail whipping behind him.

Everybody busted out laughing—everyone except for Nathaniel and Sam. For several seconds, they stood, Nathaniel's face tight but giving nothing away.

"It was an accident," Sam said instantly.

"Why are you even here?" Nathaniel said. "You don't go to church. Do you even believe in God?"

It _had_ been an accident. He wanted to tell off this rat-faced kid who'd called him a liar, but it was hard to find a good comeback when the truthful answer was _because I've got nothing better to do_.

"Yeah," said Daniel. Seconds before, he'd been laughing with all the others; now he stood next to Nathaniel. "My brother works with your brother. I know he isn't Christian."

Sam flushed. "So what?"

"So _what?"_ Nathaniel answered, incredulous.

"So it's weird you coming here when your family's like that," said Daniel.

The injustice of it all buffeted Sam. As if he was responsible for Dean, as if Dean having _religion_ or not had anything to do with anything, as if these people weren't almost as weird as his family to begin with. And why was he always, always answering for his family's weirdness?

Tyler suddenly stepped up in between them, glaring in Daniel's face. "You're just mad because _I_ brought somebody—" he began hotly.

"Yeah, and look who you brought."

"I heard you in there," Nathaniel told Sam. "You didn't say the Pledge, you don't care about the Bible, so why don't you just go away?"

"You're just pissed off because I made you look stupid," Sam said.

Nathaniel's eyes and nostrils flew wide.

"What on _Earth_ is going on here?"

Pastor Rick barged into the circle between Sam and Nathaniel. He looked angry, and he looked like his patience had very recently been exhausted.

Josh's hand flew into the air. "Sam hit Nathaniel with a ball but he said it was an accident but Nathaniel and Daniel said their family isn't Christians so Nathaniel told Sam to go away so Sam said Nathaniel's just mad 'cause he got the Bible trivia wrong," he said instantly.

Pastor Rick's face turned thunderous. He looked at Sam; Sam picked up his chin and looked back. He turned to Nathaniel; Nathaniel cringed.

After several seconds, Pastor Rick turned back to Sam. "Guess maybe you don't know the Bible as well as I thought, Sam," he said. "'There's more hope for a fool than for one who's wise in his own eyes.'"

Sam turned crimson. That sick feeling was back in his stomach.

Next the pastor turned to Nathaniel. "And Nathaniel, I'm surprised at you. Seems like you've forgotten Galatians: 'There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are _all_ one in Christ.' That's supposed to mean everybody's welcome here, because all of us are brothers."

He looked between Nathaniel and Sam for a minute. The rest of the boys stood stock-still on the periphery. "Anyway," the pastor said eventually. "Isn't there more rejoicing in Heaven over one redeemed sinner than ninety-nine righteous men?"

Startled, Sam looked up. Pastor Rick had just told him off for bragging, but now he was alluding not only to Matthew's parable, but unavoidably to Nathaniel's mistake and Sam's correction. Pastor Rick smiled at him very faintly.

The pastor turned and headed for the church. The boys began to follow.

Sam snuck a glance at Nathaniel, expecting to see him angry, only to be taken aback to find that the other boy looked closer to devastated.

* * *

The mood normalized considerably once they rejoined the girls inside. Wrap-up didn't take long, just a closing prayer in front of the flags in the banquet hall, and stacking chairs took the edge off the post-conflict adrenaline. The whole fight in the parking lot started to seem like it couldn't have been as big a deal as it had felt like at the time.

As they pushed out the side door and into the day beyond, though, Sam braced himself. He listened to the conversations around him, replied sometimes, but kept his eyes on the ground. Pastor Rick might think all men were brothers, but Sam's flesh-and-blood brother was waiting for him around the corner, and he had a way of rubbing people the wrong way even when Nathaniel hadn't primed them to think he was some kind of infidel.

Except Dean wasn't waiting for Sam around the corner, Dad was.

The car sat at the top of the drive, sleek and black and conspicuous. Sam detached himself from the group and approached as slowly as he dared. He stopped about ten feet away.

Dad turned his head in the window and smiled. "Get in, I'll give you a ride," he said.

It was just the way his father always used to smile at him: eyes crinkling, face remote behind his beard but softened by it, too. That smile had had an automatic effect on Sam his whole life. He relaxed.

Sam waved quickly to Tyler and Jordan—Daniel and Eric had gravitated toward Nathaniel's end of the crowd—and climbed into the passenger seat. "Where's Dean?" he asked, cautious not to sound cautious.

"Out with friends. He's been working hard, so I told him he could take the night."

Jealousy and injustice needled at Sam, and maybe longing too. When would he even have a chance to earn that kind of praise?

"How was youth group?" his father asked. 

How had youth group been? Sam thought about answering for real, spilling out everything about how weird it was and how weird Nathaniel was and how he wished Tyler would just stand up for him already, how he wished he had someone who would do that. Dad would have listened, before. He'd listened to plenty of verbal diarrhea like that, in plenty of car rides like this.

"Fine," he said eventually.

"Making friends?"

Sam had spent a lot of time lately resenting the fact that nobody wanted to talk to him; now he resented the interrogation. He shrugged.

"I asked you a question," Dad said.

"Yes."

His father sighed, like Sam was being ridiculous in some way, and they drove on.

Sam watched the road get swallowed beneath their tires at twenty miles an hour. He tried not to watch his father's face, though sometimes he failed. From this most familiar and mundane of perspectives—well, close; his most familiar perspective of his father was actually the back of his head—it was hard to believe that this was the same man who'd stood on the bridge the other night. There, then, it had all seemed so clear to Sam: Dad had left him the journal to find. He'd wanted Sam to read it.

Now his doubt crept upward like the water table after a storm. He was being paranoid. Dad had made a mistake and that was it. He certainly hadn't _set Sam up._ That was ludicrous.

He was shaken out of his reverie when Melton's Court rolled by at exactly the same speed everything else had. "Where are we going?"

Dad kept driving, past the coin laundry and toward the boundary of town. "Training. Dean has the day off. You don't."

Apprehension warred with relief. Dad turned left onto the highway labeled NC-41, where a brown sign pointed to _Beulah State Forest 3 mi._ Beulah State Forest was not the Statue of Liberty or anything, but at least it would be something in this place he hadn't seen yet.

The windows were down, and a couple of miles away from the lake, a stench unlike anything Sam had ever encountered punched him in the face at sixty miles an hour. "What is that?"

He'd smelled fertilizer, which this was something like, and death, which this also had a lot in common with, but the odor itself was unique. Familiar, too, but he was sure he'd remember experiencing this.

Dad tipped his head to the right. "Look."

The treeline broke and, for a few seconds, they had a good view of a long field with a lurid pink pool at the end of it. Then the trees resumed.

"Hog farm," Dad said. "Pigs poop a lot. Farmers keep the manure in big pools like that, apparently."

So that was where Sam knew this from: doing Dean's laundry. "That smells…."

"Yep. Every year, the gasses knock some farmer right out."

Sam grappled with that for a moment. The idea of a smell so intense it could physically drop somebody was hard to get his head around, but Dad seemed perfectly serious. "Then what happens?"

"They drown. If they don't choke first."

Sam pictured the pool. The smell was abating, thankfully, but strong enough still. He shuddered. "That's got to be, like, the worst way to die."

Dad was silent for a little while. "Probably close," was all he finally said.

"Dean's working on a farm like that?"

"Yes, he is." Dad had his eyes on the road. "Are you jealous now?"

When Sam hesitated before he said no, he saw a muscle tighten in his father's jaw. They made the rest of the trip in silence.

Half a mile past the start of the state forest, Dad slowed and turned left at an unmarked dirt road. They crawled over deep ruts and then up onto a shoulder blanketed in pine needles six inches thick. A sign promised fines of up to $200 for the illegal collection of same.

Sam looked around as they got out. This wasn't like any other forest he'd been in: the trees, all pine and uniformly distanced, marched out in an unbroken grid to either side of the road. All the trunks were the same width; all the crowns were the same height. It was a little eerie. Still, it was a detail about the world he currently called home that Sam hadn't had before. So this was what was behind the thin line of civilization of the Putt-Putt, the post office, the coin laundry. Sam liked and hated knowing such things. It always felt like if he knew enough of them, he'd be able to unlock the place in which he found himself and understand how it worked, how people moved in it, how he could move in it too.

"What are we doing today?"

"Just drills." Dad reached in through the open back window for a grocery bag bulging with Gatorade bottles. "General PT, some falls and rolls, and"—He grimaced up at a pine tree.—"climbs." He glanced at Sam. "Both of us, not just you. So take it easy on your old man."

The words were so companionable, like something Dad would have said Before. No, not even that; like something he would have said to Dean. It felt weird. Sam craved it.

Dean bitched at Sam for bitching about training, but it wasn't the work that Sam had a problem with. Well, okay, some of it was, but Dean wasn't any better than he was as far as that went. Nobody liked doing Army crawls for hours under a broiling sun, but what catapulted Sam's dislike into hate was the pointlessness of it all. Dean got to go on hunts. Dean got entrusted with information; Dad even asked his opinion on it, sometimes. Dean sweated and busted his ass, but he got to use all that training. Sam didn't, and it was abundantly clear at this point that he never would, so for him, training was nothing but an exercise in humiliation.

_Whatever,_ he'd finally consoled himself. _Hunting blows chunks and I hate it._ But that had never exactly been true. Or at least, it had been true enough whenever his father showed up days late and tried to hide the blood in his laundry; or the time Dean had been confined to bed with a fever, raving and not seeing Sam even when his eyes were open; or the time it had been Dad, returned to them like a package care of Martin Creaser because he couldn't stand up for a whole week in which he'd lain, drugged up and muttering and very, very mortal; or all the times Sam's family just ditched him, even if nothing went wrong, because pretty much nothing was duller than the same four motel walls for a week with no one to talk to. It did blow chunks then.

But when he crouched beside his brother in woods where the air between trees seemed strung taut, holding his breath, hearing Dean hold his, afraid but very, very alive; when the tiniest sound dropped into that silence and they erupted together and ran, feeling the ground drop away like they were flying, feeling the distance between themselves and the trees and their quarry and each other like a sixth sense, like proprioception exploded outward; when Dean moved and Sam knew exactly where he was supposed to be, exactly what he was supposed to do; when Dean raised his gun for fire and Sam raised his for cover, when Dean started one thing and Sam finished it, like a sentence they made in the world together; then he did not hate it.

All they'd taken down that day had been a deer, though.

Now Dad jogged at Sam's pace down hard-packed sand. He did push-ups at Sam's side. He groaned and cussed his way up the neighboring tree, and shook bark out of his crotch when he got back down again, same as Sam did.

Dad announced a break around four. Walking off the last set of exercises, they reached the state forest boundary marked by wire strung between the trees with _NO TRESPASSING_ signs hung on it. They nursed Gatorade and swatted at mosquitoes the size of horseflies.

"What's at the end of the road?" Sam meant the main one, where the sun beat down relentlessly and they'd done all their jogging, not this side offshoot.

"State park. Another lake. Lakes all over this area."

"Can we go?" Sam asked. He meant: _Can we stop now?_

"Too many people there." Answer: Nope.

The forest smelled of pine needles baking in the sun. Dragonflies sat thick on the wire boundary line. In the shade, it was hot but not bad, lulling and drowsy.

Too soon, Dad got up, brushing needles from his pants. "All right, come on."

Sam groaned.

"Don't give me that." Dad's tone wasn't sharp, but it was firm.

Sam stood. "Dad…." This was pushing his luck, but he couldn't help it. "When am I ever gonna use all this stuff?"

Dad didn't answer right away. "You know what's out there," he said. "You've seen some of it. And you're not ready. You're a good athlete, Sammy, but survival isn't sports, and you don't have the kind of instincts your brother does."

_"What_ instincts?" Sam bit out.

Dad said calmly, "To kill. To hurt things if you have to. You're smart and you're quick and you're strong for your age, but you hold back, Sam. You can't hold back when something's trying to kill you. You can't shy away from extremes. You have to be willing to do anything, and you can't stop and think about it before you do. That's what Dean has: killer instincts. You live in your head too much."

Dean had a way of talking about himself like he was Rambo, Chuck Norris, and John Wayne rolled together. It was annoying, but the thing that really drove Sam up the wall about it was that it wasn't purely bullshit. Dean _was_ good. Not as good as Dad and not as good as he talked like, but good. He had the strength that Sam didn't. He had the consistency that Sam didn't. He had muscle mass and pubic hair, and apparently he had, too, some indefinable spark that Sam didn't. Sam's deficiencies went deeper than just being short and scrawny. He could work on his skill and he'd get at least somewhat taller eventually, but what was he supposed to do about some spiritual quality he'd been born missing?

He stood there wishing he'd kept his mouth shut.

After several seconds of consideration, Dad said, "You're no longer grounded."

That was about the last thing Sam had expected to hear. Somehow it didn't make him feel better, either. "Why?"

Dad blinked. For a second Sam thought he was going to say something like, _Well, if you're going to talk back about it, I guess you can stay grounded._ For a second, Dad looked like he thought he was going to say something like that, too. But what he actually said was, "If you're not sorry yet, is anything I can do going to change that?"

Sam said nothing.

"So you can go out during the day," Dad said. "You leave a note any time you do, and you don't hitchhike unless it's a life-or-death emergency. You follow the same rules you had before, because I know the problem isn't that you didn't understand them." He glanced at his watch. "Daylight's wasting, let's go."

Sam threw himself into the next set of exercises with everything he had—only for Dad to reprimand him for that, too. "Slow up!" his father shouted. "Pace yourself!"

_Pace yourself,_ said his father. _Put me down, Sam,_ said his brother; and there'd been the _way_ he'd said it, like he didn't even know Sam, like there was something wrong with him.

And then, of course, Sam had gone down flat on his face. Now he couldn't tell whether his sin had been failing or trying in the first place, and his head was pounding from the sun.

What had he thought was going to happen back there, anyway? Had he thought he was going to make it to the top of that bridge through sheer determination? Had he thought he was going to show them? Had he thought it would be like a movie, himself the star clawing his way to redemption?

Yeah. Yeah, he had.

They jogged and they did sit-ups. They did side-steps and slow-motion tackles and rolls that thumped their muscles so rhythmically into warm sand it was almost like a massage, and after a while it was hard to dwell on the past when the present demanded so much attention.

By the time they made it back to the car, Sam actually felt pleasantly drained. He melted into the hot car seat with a warm Gatorade in hand, and he saw his father doing the same thing, both of them slumping with little groans. It felt good, like sharing something.

On the way home, Dad suddenly said, "You want to pick up a video for tonight?"

Sam straightened himself up. "Can we?" he asked, waiting for the catch.

A smile flitted behind his father's beard. "Yeah. Just let Dean think he got to have all the fun, though. He likes that."

After a minute, Sam felt himself smile back.

* * *

Dad and Dean teased Sam for always renting _Ghostbusters,_ but he didn't care. In his earliest memories of the movie, he'd liked the boppy theme music, hidden from the snarling dogs, been terrified of the self-cooking eggs, been transfixed by the crystal gateway. He hadn't understood any of the jokes back then, but that was just one of _Ghostbusters'_ charms: the older he got, the more he got out of it.

In recent years it had been largely the New York-ness of it that held him spellbound. Even after they'd gone there and he'd found out that the real thing kind of sucked, the idea of New York had remained magical. Watching _Ghostbusters_ felt a bit like when he'd lie on the floor, and imagine an upside-down world where people walked around on the ceiling. In that world, everything was somehow cooler, more interesting, more how it was supposed to be. So too in the Ghostbusters' New York City. Seeing the interstate from the vantage point of the truck cabs he'd hitchhiked in, just a few feet up but at an angle that made the road look completely new, had given him something of the same feeling.

But _Ghostbusters_ was checked out. After a moment's hesitation, Sam took Ghostbusters II. He'd only seen it once, that night with Dean; perhaps it, like the original, improved with age. Besides, choosing something new always took way too long, and he didn't want to test his father's patience.

Then they got pizza. Which Sam had also had for lunch, but no one in his right mind ever turned down pizza, and he was starving since the woods, and—and this wasn't just pizza, anyway; it was a pizza night. It had been a long time since they'd had one of those. Sam and Dean ordered pizza together often enough, but it was different when their father brought pizza home. It felt normal, safe, like a real family. Even before Sam had run away, it had been a long time since Dad had done that. He was always busy, lately.

On their way out of the pizzeria, they passed a guy with a beer gut and a t-shirt that read, _Jesus Loves You (Everyone Else Thinks You're an Asshole)._ "There's this kid, Nathaniel," Sam said as they got into the car.

Dad craned his neck to back out of the parking lot. "Uh-huh?"

"He's weird. He has a _rat-tail._ He's, like, eleven and he wants to be a preacher when he grows up. He's always sucking up to the pastor and he hates me even though I didn't even do anything to him. He's just mad because I got this Bible question right because Pastor Jim told a story about it once, except I could swear he had it out for me even before that. Like, just because I said we've lived in seventeen states, which is _true,_ but he said I had to be lying."

Dad waited for the road to clear and then coasted the car across it on a bias, so that they crossed basically straight from the pizza parlor to the Melton's Court driveway. "Nobody likes a show-off."

He said it absently, but it stung anyway. "Well, he earned it," Sam said. Dad parked; Sam gathered up the pizza boxes and stood behind him as he fished for the right key. "We were playing Hacky Sack and Nathaniel got in the way of my shot, but it was a total accident, but Nathaniel got all pissed off like I did it on purpose but everybody else thought it was hilarious. So then Daniel took Nathaniel's side even though he'd laughed too, and then—then they said some stuff, so Pastor Rick came up, and he was mad at me but I think he was madder at Nathaniel, because—"

Sam realized midstream that he was not exactly exonerating himself. He followed his father into the trailer and shut up.

The place was a little eerie without Dean, even after Dad switched on the light. Sam hadn't ever been in here at night when his brother wasn't home, and it felt weird. Empty. That was dumb, of course; Dad was here. But then he got out of the shower and there was freaking Kool-Aid, and if Sam was basking a little, it wasn't like he could help it. He hadn't thought his father would ever forgive him, but this looked so much like maybe he had. Coming on the heels of the things he'd said in the forest, that was confusing as hell, but it was also… nice. If Dad forgave him, maybe Dean would.

As ECTO-1 came careening onscreen grimed up and chugging smoke, Dad said, "Sam, you know what I do—what we do—is important, right?"

Sam froze with pizza in his mouth. Dad's tone was serious, in that way adults used when they really wanted kids to pay attention, but remained oblivious to the fact that the sheer embarrassment made it a struggle to stay in the room at all. It evinced that awkward, squirmy feeling Sam got in the guidance counselor's office except worse because this was Dad. And that was before he even factored in what the question had to really be about.

The best response Sam could manage under these circumstances was, "Yeah, I know, Dad."

_What we do is important._ It was flat-out weird to say stuff like that; it being true was no defense. When adults spoke this way it was like they thought dinky little kid-brains couldn't handle anything else, like this was the only way kids would ever catch on that something mattered. At least when Dean talked about hunting he found other ways to say it: _What we do is badass,_ or _We're like the Army Rangers but so much cooler._ The nearest he'd approached to this kind of mortifying solemnity had been _Dad is a superhero,_ and even then, though Sam had felt a twinge of embarrassment, it hadn't been the same. That had been because Dean was that earnest, not because he thought he had to be for Sam.

Obviously Sam didn't say any of that. He buried his face in his Kool-Aid glass, and Dad left it there. They shut up and watched the movie.

Sam was starving; he inhaled two slices of pizza and was halfway through a third before the regret hit, too late. The pizza pushed at him from the inside like it had earlier, behind the church, and he was even more keenly aware of it with his father right next to him. The starch conspired with the afternoon's training and the heat to push him down, down into the couch cushions, and it wasn't even nine o'clock but he was starting to think he'd fall asleep before the end of his own movie, never mind Dad's.

He struggled to focus on the plot. Something had tried to take Venkman's girlfriend's baby. Where she'd gotten a baby between this movie and the last one, Sam wasn't too clear on. Except, no, maybe something had tried to kill her baby? Either way, everybody was afraid there was something wrong with it, even its mother.

_—Okay. Subject is a male Caucasian, approximately—_

Venkman and Sigourney Weaver weren't together anymore, it seemed. Sam was really unclear on whose baby this was. He picked up his Kool-Aid and fumbled the glass a little.

Dad got him more when he got himself more beer, saying something about how much they had sweated. That was true enough. Sam felt the headache creeping in, and he drank deep even though the cherry flavor wasn't as good as he remembered. And then Ray, funny, chubby, ever-sincere Ray, was being lowered down, down, down, and—

_—It's a river of slime!_

Sam had been six or seven when he'd watched this for the first time. He didn't remember where, just that Dean had been with him, and that they'd had a TV in their room, and that he'd seen _Ghostbusters II_ was going to play at 11:50 p.m. in the _TV Guide_ and had called dibs on the remote on the spot, reasserting the claim throughout the day lest his brother try to pull a fast one. They'd watched in the dark, on their bellies at the ends of their beds in order to get close enough to hear the TV while keeping it turned down low enough not to wake their father. Sam hadn't gotten any of the jokes and had kept bugging Dean to explain lines to him; Dean, translating, had just said that none of it was funny and this sequel sucked.

Which had been borne out. New York didn't feel magical in this one, despite the entire plot about how great New York was; Sam hadn't understood how or why the Statue of Liberty was walking around, and the creepy little man with curly hair had made his stomach feel like it was trying to crawl out of his body. And, of course, the slime.

It was luridly pink. Sam was surprised this time to see that it glowed; in his memories, it had been flat pink, like Pepto-Bismol. But maybe all this time he'd actually been remembering the dreams he'd had after.

The A/C in here was crap; the air was too warm and too still and too quiet. Dad didn't make noise the way Dean did. The _spludge-splat_ of the slime on the screen was really distinct. Unlike Dean, Dad didn't rag on Sam or give him a noogie when he started shifting around nervously, either, which meant he had nothing to distract him from it.

The slime was thick and translucent and somehow 3-D. Sam could see _folds_ in the stuff, ribbons of pigment showing the path along which anybody the river caught would be dragged under. The slime reached for Ray.

Sam stood up. "I gotta pee," he said. As soon as he was vertical, he realized it was true. His bladder throbbed, but the sensation was distant; his whole body felt that way.

In the bathroom, he listened for the scene to pass; when the shouting cut out he started to open the door only to hear that creepy man's creepy voice: _I thought I would stop by to see how it is with you, you know, because of all this blackness._ Sam shuddered. The actor's voice reminded him of the old guy in the coin laundry. He didn't know why. It wasn't the same accent at all, but maybe it was the same amount of accent, the same amount of alienness.

The pizza was heavy in his stomach again, and he wished he hadn't eaten so much. He thought about sticking his fingers down his throat to get rid of the feeling. He'd heard of girls doing that. There'd been one girl at his last school everybody said did it; they called her Upchuck Chelsea. Supposedly she did it to be thin. Sam didn't want to be thin, but he wanted this feeling _out._

Abruptly he realized that he was basically hiding from a scary movie in a janky bathroom the size of a closet, and the thought of getting caught out doing that was scarier than the stupid slime. He wiped the yellow gunk that was dripping from the faucet yet again with a scrap of TP and a grimace, flushed, washed his hands again for show, and went back out.

Despite everything he'd drunk and peed out he was _thirsty._ He reached for his glass to refill it, but Dad stopped him. "I don't want you staying up all night on a sugar rush."

Sam could have protested—he was quite sure he wasn't getting a sugar rush—and he could have gotten water instead, but he found himself folding down into the couch again, with a distinct sense of having his strings cut.

Warmth made the air thick, slow to draw into his lungs and heavy when it got there. It made his tired muscles go soft and seem to merge into the sagging sofa; he saw his father at the end, remote, moving his beer bottle to and from his lips with a motion that seemed almost mechanical. Up, down. Up, down. Up, down.

_I want Dean,_ he thought despairingly out of nowhere.

Courthouse. A judge was thundering from the bench, unfairly, at the Ghostbusters, who were innocent of something or other. Pink slime jumped in its container every time the judge bellowed. Sam wanted to jump, too, but he was too sleepy.

Every time his eyes slid closed, pictures rose up to meet him: a river of pink slime, viscous and pulling. Then he'd shake himself awake to focus on the screen. But his eyes kept closing again, and the pictures on the insides of his lids were a little warmer and stickier each time. He was in the river now. He knew it could pull him under, but in the picture he wanted to swim so he did. He kicked out, but his movements were slow and deadened like he was on an invisible tether. The river flowed in ribbons, in curiously distinct strands, arching up in beautiful but frightening liquid cathedrals over him, braiding him into itself, and it was over his face, and it pushed into his mouth, onto his tongue, and down his throat.

* * *

The river had him. It was made of bands of color like this wallpaper he'd had once, pink and red and Southwest yellow and orange. The bands could crush, but they didn't. They just pulled. They pulled him along and his mouth dragged open, like a fish on a hook in a current. He felt it flood his nose and settle in his stomach and push out, out, out to every edge of him.

He was in a truck cab. He loved being in the truck cab; it was a whole new world up here, and he watched the road peel by. They were coming down a ramp on a cloverleaf. When they reached the bottom of the ramp and he thought they were coming to the end of it, he saw that the top ramp they'd been on was just the beginning. The complexity of it frightened him, but it fascinated him more. They were sliding along the cloverleaf's strands, being folded down into it, and the trucker beside him was blank and benign and Sam was afraid for him but could do nothing. The ramps multiplied, braided, moved, became a river of bands of black, a whirlpool.

At the bottom of the whirlpool was a rose. A really big rose, the size of a house, the size of a ferris wheel. Sam didn't want to go there. He tried to dig in his heels; he could do that in the truck, there were holes in the floor for it, but the cab was too big and heavy and the road only sanded his feet off.

Now he stood in front of the rose and craned his neck to look up at it. Its petals were very red. His blood pulsed with fear. He didn't want to touch the rose, but he knew that he was going to.

Someone said, simply: Hello.

He saw himself sit down on a petal. The petal turned black, and the whole rose turned black, and he stood outside himself and watched—

"—Sammy!"

Sam was divided. One layer had Dean and the ceiling of the trailer in it; the other… the other…

"…wake up!"

He realized with a jolt that his eyes were in fact closed. The river was flowing on this side of his eyes. He didn't want to go back in, so he opened them. When he did, there was another jolt: Dean's face, scared.

Suddenly his brother, the overhead light, the dingy walls and the rain beating the tiny windows all snapped into focus, even as Sam himself remained foggy. Everything here in the world was so distinct, and the images of the dream were already gone from his mind, yet he knew it was waiting for him just behind his eyelids and he could feel it pulling him back. He could feel it was stronger than he was, and that it was going to win. He started to cry.

Dean grabbed him and hugged him and started saying stuff: _You're okay, Sammy, it's just a nightmare. Calm down, you're fine, you're okay._

_No, I'm not,_ Sam didn't bother saying. After a while it didn't seem to matter, anyway.

At some point he took more notice of the throbbing in his head than of the pressure in his chest. Then, too, of Dean's hands rubbing his back and his own face smashed into Dean's front. The shirt smelled of cigarettes and perfume, alien and wrong. Sam sagged against it anyway, dully aware of the wet patch there and that it had come from him.

Dean stroked ash-smelling fingers through his hair. "Why'd you run away, Sammy?"

His voice was so soft and so hurt, but Sam had no answer for it. There was nothing to say he hadn't already tried to. "I told you why."

"What do you mean? When?"

"In my note."

The hands stopped moving. Dean let go of him and stood up; the room canted sideways, and Sam caught himself with a hand on the mattress.

"Why are you still lying?" Dean asked coldly.

Was that a dream-Dean or the real Dean? "I'm not."

"You know, what I don't get is why?" Dean's voice cracked across Sam's mental fog like Dad's hand across his cheek, and the room sharpened up again. There was a distinct patter of rain on the roof. "Even if I was stupid enough to believe you, it wouldn't make up for what you put us through."

Sam glared, the anger making his head pound harder. "You _are_ stupid, if you never found it."

Dean scoffed. His face was cast in shadow where he loomed over the bed, but Sam could see the disgust there plain enough, and an ugly twist of self-righteousness. "Whatever your malfunction is, Sam, you might want to get it together. Unlike you, I actually have a life. I have friends. I have a girlfriend. Know what time my curfew is now? Three in the morning. So get used to me not being here all the time to tuck you in and wipe your nose and entertain you all the live-long, because I've got better things to do."

Sam climbed off the bed. There was hardly any room in here, but Dean edged backwards as Sam's bare feet hit the carpet. The rain on the roof was getting louder.

"What difference is that going to make?" The words came pouring out of Sam, the things he'd wanted to say every time he'd had his bags checked, or logged his movements with a surly motel manager, or sat on a roof on top of an empty house. "You're never here, anyway! Nobody is! Why do you even care that I ran away? You don't! You're just mad that I broke one of his stupid rules because _you're_ too scared to!"

The yellow disk of the overhead light shone behind Dean's head. "You have no idea," he said. Sam had seen his brother angry before, but not shaking and incoherent with it. "No idea."

Sam wanted to retort, You _have no idea,_ but Dean turned and snatched his pillow and blanket from the bed before banging out of the room like the air was contaminated. He didn't even turn off the light.

Sam's heart raced and his skin was slick with sweat and his head hurt maybe more than it ever had in his life. He sat heavily on the bed. Rain pelted against the trailer so hard that water leaked around the window and dripped down the wall. It hit the patch on the blankets that was always wet from the A/C anyway, a rapid patter rather than the slow, irregular drip he was used to. The storm could get in; he could get out.

The walls tilted and fuzzed when he got up on his knees. He scrabbled ineffectually at the window for an uncertain amount of time before the fact that it was sealed shut with duct tape penetrated. Of course it was. There was the A/C unit in this one. He climbed up onto Dean's bed, to the window he used to get onto the roof, and tugged at the sash. It didn't give; he fell back on his ass. Had to be latched. He got back up on his knees again and fumbled around under the slats of the Venetian blind. His fingers couldn't seem to find the lock.

The window strobed white and the air cracked clean in two. The overhead lamp cut out and Sam wound up in the well between the beds.

With the lamp off, the motel's light intruded through the blinds, just as it had every night in this place. Sam lay with his back on the floor and his legs on Dean's bed, heart galloping. He didn't know why his mouth was so dry. He wanted water, but he wouldn't have gone out to the kitchen even if the room hadn't been spinning at the edges. He got back up on his own bed and held his hands under the drip off the windowsill. Another flash of lightning showed little streamers of dirt and mold running from the frame through the water, and he flung what had accumulated in his hands away.

He felt heavy, like something was pulling him down into the mattress, and he thought longingly about being out in the storm, rain and wind lashing him, lashing through him, fresh and cool and clean. Blankets were under his back instead. The air didn't move. Over the roar of the rain, he heard the water dripping, fast and too rhythmic. He knew he was falling back asleep, and he knew he was going to dream.

* * *

He woke alone. The room was empty, the whole trailer silent. The alarm clock flashed an incoherent time, but the gray light and quiet suggested it was early.

When he lifted it, his head hurt dully. Memories of the previous night were strewn about like shrapnel. Dean had been here, he knew that. Dean had seen him lose his everloving shit and cry like a three-year-old from a bad dream. Dean had said what he'd said. Sam had said what he'd said. In the present, he was parched from his mouth to his cuticles.

Kool-Aid was his first thought, but the pitcher was upended in the dish rack, stained faint pink inside. Pizza and movies with Dad had been real, then; didn't feel like it now though. Stupid of him to have believed things were actually going to be okay.

He peed forever and drank two glasses of water and his mouth was still cotton and the house was still empty. Sam tried to dredge up the violent emotion of the night before and failed. Every time he had a blowout, part of him always believed that if he could just feel whatever was inside of him enough, he could get it _out_ of him—that he could stop feeling things if he found a way to feel all of them. It was never true.

It was never true, and he was sick of crying about it.

There was a paper pad stuck to the side of the fridge, with a stub of pencil dangling from a magnet by a string. These things hadn't come with the rental; they were Dad's. He brought them everywhere he took his sons. Sam scrawled on the pad and ran out of the house.

His Converse slapped loud on the church's driveway in the quiet; he'd passed a grand total of two vehicles on the way here. He went straight for the front door and yanked on it. Locked. He blinked. Pastor Jim's church was never locked; Sam had thought it was, like, a law, or something. He tried the side door. Also locked. Presumably it would stay locked until people started showing up for Sunday service, and Sam didn't want people, he wanted the place. He wanted cool and quiet just for a few minutes, just for long enough to make a plan. He slid down the wall and pressed his forehead into his knees.

"Sam?"

He jerked his head up.

Pastor Rick was standing a few yards away in an undershirt and flip-flops. "What's the matter?" he asked. "Are you all right?"

Sam got to his feet. "Sorry." He bolted.

Pastor Rick jumped into his path, arms flung wide like a goalie, and Sam barely managed to pull up in time. "Whoa, whoa, whoa! Slow down a moment. What's going on, son?" Humiliated and aghast at himself, Sam said nothing. "I know you didn't come for services, seeing as it's"—Pastor Rick checked his watch.—"six-forty in the morning, and we don't start till nine."

Sam knew he should keep his mouth shut. Every time he opened it, he said something he regretted, especially the true things; he kept getting himself all over the place no matter how many times he swore that he wouldn't. Anyway, the pastor was nowhere near able to actually stop him. Sam should just duck under his arm, take a kidney shot on his way past if he had to, and not stop running until—

"My family hates me," he blurted out.

Pastor Rick blinked. "Why do you say that?"

"Because they do," said Sam. "I know they do and Dean told me he does and they _should."_

The pastor stood there. He looked odd, in shorts and an undershirt, and there was a smell of cigarettes on his breath Sam had never guessed at before. Strange to think of adults who wore uniforms having existences out of them.

"All right," Pastor Rick said after a minute. "The deacons will be coming at eight to set things up, but I can put them off until 8:30 before they need me. Give me ten minutes. Wait right here."

He flip-flopped back across the lawn to the house nearest the church. Sam watched him go, and then, having no better ideas, did as the pastor said.

When Pastor Rick returned, it was in the clothes Sam associated with his profession: crisp-creased khakis and a short-sleeved button-down, the latter dressed up with a tie for Sunday. He applied a bundle of keys to the side door and led the way inside. "We can talk in my office," he told Sam.

Being in the pastor's office felt not unlike being in the principal's, or, worse, the guidance counselor's. It kind of looked like that, too: there were motivational posters on the wall, three-ring binders on a shelf, and a desk of wood-grain plastic laminate, all brightly illuminated by fluorescent lights overhead. Although Sam could see certain resemblances here and there to Pastor Jim's office, mainly in the paperwork, it looked and felt nothing like it otherwise.

Pastor Rick didn't go to the desk. There was a small conference table in here, with rolling office chairs crowded around it; he gestured Sam to one while settling into another. Sam left that seat empty between them and sat in a third more distant, but Pastor Rick didn't say anything at the small disobedience.

"You said Dean told you he hates you," said Pastor Rick. "That's your brother?"

"Yeah."

"What about your mom and dad?"

"It's just my dad. My dad and my brother."

Pastor Rick tilted his head. "Grandparents? Aunts, uncles, cousins?"

Sam shook his head.

"I know you're not local. Where's your family from?"

"Kansas. Or, I guess Dad and Dean are, but I don't even remember anything from there. We're always moving."

Pastor Rick nodded slowly. "That's right, the boys were talking about it. So you've lived in thirty-nine states, huh?"

Sam colored. "Seventeen. We've only been to thirty-nine."

"That's still a lot. Do you like traveling, Sam?"

Sam shrugged.

"Travel's good education. You can learn a lot about people. I did a mission to Africa; taught me a lot. One day you'll be glad your dad gave you that, I bet."

"He's not doing it for us, he's doing it for his stupid business—"

"Hey, now. That business keeps clothes on your back and a roof over your head. Don't be calling it stupid."

Sam felt betrayed that the pastor was taking Dad's side in this, and then was surprised at how betrayed he felt.

"I can see how it would be hard on you, too, though," said Pastor Rick. "Can't be easy to keep in touch with your friends." As if Sam had any. "Anyway, did your Dad tell you he hates you?"

"No, but he does," Sam said vehemently.

"Don't be too sure. What about your brother? You said he did tell you he hates you. Is that really what he said? He say, 'Sam, I hate you'?"

Sam tried to recall all that had passed between them last night. Some of the words were hazy, but others stood out sharply. "Basically."

"How come?"

"Because— Because I ran away from home." Now the words were out, Sam felt sick with adrenaline. "But he doesn't understand, he thinks I just did it to be an assh— to be a brat."

Pastor Rick studied him for a while. "Well, why did you run away, Sam?"

So many reasons rose up in Sam's mind all at once: _Because I don't have any friends. Because it's not fair. Because monsters are real. Because I'm always scared and they act like they never are. Because I'm a coward but they're dumb. Because they leave all the time and I'm afraid they're going to die and there'll be no one; because I'm always alone and I hate it and I hate them; because I can't stand feeling like this, I can't stand it, I can't._

But he couldn't tell the pastor any of that, so he resorted to saying aloud the reason he'd written down, the one he'd wanted Dean to have but somehow Dean never got:

"There's something wrong with me."

Pastor Rick frowned and leaned forward. "What do you mean, Sam?" When Sam didn't answer, he adjusted the question. "Why do you say there's something wrong with you?"

The feeling roiling around inside Sam, the one he'd been trying to keep in a tight little ball, swelled until it was pushing at all of his seams. "Because I can feel it. I can feel it all the time. I don't know what it is, it's just, everything I've ever done, I can't stop messing up, I know I messed up but it's not fair, I don't know how to stop feeling like this, I don't know what's _wrong_ with me."

Finally he managed to clamp down on the stream of words. None of them said it right, and he just sounded like a whiny brat. He balled his hands into fists that he hid in the tail of his too-big t-shirt.

After a while he realized that the room had been silent for quite some time. He looked up. Pastor Rick was smiling at him. Sam didn't know what he'd expected, but it hadn't been that. Anger started to bleed into his embarrassment—he thought this was funny?—but then the pastor said, "Sam, there's something wrong with all of us."

Sam stared.

"Sam," Pastor Rick said again, "there's something wrong with all of us, but you're lucky. You know why? Because you _feel_ it."

"Huh?" said Sam, articulately.

Pastor Rick rolled the extra chair between them out of the way and scooted forward to put a hand on Sam's shoulder. "Sam, you're not the first person to feel like this. A lot of people do. Heck, sooner or later, everybody does. It's just most people get real good at ignoring it."

The pastor hadn't understood. He clearly hadn't understood. "No," Sam said, "not like that. It's different. There's something— It isn't normal, _I'm_ not normal, I know this isn't right. Dad's never like this. Dean's never like this."

"You sure? You ever asked them? You positive they'd tell you the truth if you did? You think they'd show you what you're showing me now?" Sam sat silent; the pastor continued. "You say you keep messing up, and I believe you. I believe you because I know what that's like. Me, Sam: I do. And you're right that there is something wrong with you, but that's not because you're a monster. It's because you're human."

"But I always— I always feel s-so—"

Pastor Rick's smile went a little sad. "Guilty?"

_Bad,_ Sam had been going to say, but he nodded anyway.

"Sam, do you know what original sin is?"

"Yeah."

"What do you think it is?"

"We ate the apple in the Garden," he recited promptly, then added, "supposedly."

"Supposedly?"

"One of our family friends is a pastor, too. And I've read most of the Bible."

"You know a lot about the Bible. I wish more young people knew as much as you; heck, I wish my own daughters did. But you don't believe, do you."

It wasn't a question. Sam shrugged.

"Well, that's all right. Anyway, yeah, Adam ate the apple, and that was wrong, but you ever think about why it was wrong?"

Sam hadn't, particularly. "God said not to, according to the story."

A minute pause told him his skepticism hadn't gone unnoticed, but it did go unremarked this time. "Original sin isn't just about disobedience, Sam," Pastor Rick said. "Sure, man disobeyed, and oh, we keep disobeying, but that isn't the real problem. Disobedience is the symptom, not the disease. See, original sin isn't so much something Adam did as it is the distance we have between us and God because of it. It's how far away we've strayed, even the best of us. And that's sad enough, but the real tragedy is, a lot of people go through life and never even notice it."

"If noticing it means feeling like this, then I wish I didn't notice it, either."

"That's where you're wrong, Sam."

"Why?" Sam threw down. "Because I'll go to Hell if I don't do what He says?"

"Yes," said Pastor Rick, "but that isn't what I was thinking of. It's a tragedy because there's a better way and God wants us to find it. He wants it more than you or I can imagine, so much He gave up His only Son. I know you think your dad hates you right now, Sam, but trust me: there is no greater sacrifice a father can make."

Sam was in a church office, the very den of what his family usually called Bible-thumpers, talking to a pastor about original sin. He felt weird, and obscurely guilty, like he was here under false pretenses. "My dad says there's no such thing as God."

"Well, that's between your dad and God. I know who's going to win that one, though."

Stupid as it was, Sam felt a little clench of fear at the words.

"I know what you're probably thinking," Pastor Rick said. "Of course I'd say something like that—I'm a southern Bible-thumper after all, right?" Sam blushed to the roots of his hair. "It's all right. I've been called worse. If I was in your shoes, I'd think it, too. I know I would, because once upon a time, I was."

"You were?"

Pastor Rick leaned back in his chair. "I wasn't born a preacher. No, I was quite the skeptic once. I was a chemist, did you know that?"

"Uh, no."

"UNC. Got my degrees, went to work for a fertilizer company, made a packet for a while. But I could never seem to feel right. No matter how much money I made or how many people respected me, there was always that feeling deep inside. Even when I got married, even when I became a father, that feeling was always there underneath. I didn't even really believe there could be such a thing as peace, because I'd never felt it."

"So what did you do?"

Pastor Rick let his chair swing upright again. "Let me ask you this: you said there's something wrong with you. You feel like it's something you can fix?"

After a second, Sam shook his head.

That smile again. Pastor Rick clapped him on the shoulder and stood. "You and me both. Tell you what, I have to go help our ladies set up for the service. Why don't you stick around and see what you think?"

That was right, wasn't it: this place was built to hold a congregation, not provide solitary shelter. Sam thought of dozens and dozens of strangers, adults and children alike, inundating the church; of being stuck in the midst of people all moving around like they knew where they were going and what to do and laughing and talking and looking comfortable because they were, because they did actually belong here— "I don't know," he said.

Pastor Rick hunted through the file trays on his desk. "A lot of kids think church is boring, but I think you're more mature than most." He found a legal pad with sermon notes on it and straightened up. "You're a lucky boy, Sam," he repeated. "I know you don't feel like it right now, but you really are. Stick around and see the medicine God has for us if you want. What do you have to lose?"

So Sam followed Pastor Rick through the corridors to a lobby and double doors marked _Sanctuary_. He'd not yet been in the sanctuary, and it wasn't what he'd expected. It was big and wide, but windowless, with a stage at the front, lights mounted on the pitched ceiling, and what had to be at least a couple hundred chairs laid out in three sections. It felt more like a high school auditorium than a church.

Pastor Rick told him to sit anywhere and headed up to the stage to confer with the people already there. The stage was draped in black, heightening the resemblance to a school auditorium ready for a play. Big paper chains were strewn on the floor. Rather than a crucifix, or one big cross, two white crosses flanked center stage. They were lit from behind in purple.

Sam sat in a back corner and watched a band set up on the stage, like the one that had come to the field. Behind the middle section of seating, a table held a projector, more lights, and what looked like sound controls. Miss Nancy and Miss Claire from the youth group were running microphone wires out from the stage wings.

"Who're you?" somebody demanded.

Sam looked up. A teenaged girl stood over him, a sheaf of xeroxed programs in her hands. She looked glad neither to see Sam nor to be here.

"Sanctuary doors open at 8:45," she told him without waiting for an actual answer.

"Pastor Rick told me to sit in here. Who are _you?"_

The girl rolled her eyes and shoved a stack of programs at him. "Here, set these out on that row. Ugh." She turned back to say, "I'm Kristina," then stomped off to the next section.

A buzz of conversation built in the lobby behind them, and when the clock read 8:44, the doors opened and the buzz started coming through. There were a lot of people. Sam regretted not leaving, but also felt like it was now too late. People laughed and greeted each other, the women mostly in dresses, the men in collared shirts. Kids chased each other up and down the aisles. He looked for Tyler, or Jordan, or even Nathaniel, anyone he knew, but it was too crowded. In a sea of white faces, which he had not previously noticed as such, Sam counted two black people.

The seats nearest the stage filled first, but soon enough an elderly couple was scooting into Sam's row, boxing him in. Now it really was too late to leave. A balding grandfather-type Sam knew on sight for retired Air Force proffered his hand with a kindly, "Hello, nice to see you!"

"We're glad to see you here!" said his wife, who smelled like talcum powder.

Then the elderly couple in _front_ of him turned around, along with their children and grandchildren, and the ritual repeated.

It was loud. Quiet was the primary thing Sam associated with churches, and the reason he'd run here in the first place, and this place had none on offer.

The house lights dipped warningly, which drew Sam's eye up to colored lights whirling on the ceiling. He squinted in disbelief. He'd gamed shooting galleries with Dean in carnivals with fewer theatrics than this place.

Somebody started a countdown: "Thirty! Twenty-nine—!" and the congregation took it up. Everybody was chanting by the end: _Ten! Nine! Eight! Seven!_

At _Zero!_ Pastor Rick came jogging onto the stage from the wings, to wild whoops and applause. He drew up at the microphone between the purple-lit crosses. "How's everybody doin' this morning?" he called.

Cheerful responses were shouted from all quarters.

"Oh! It's so good to see you! It's so good to be here, united in the love of Christ!" He freed his microphone and paced to the edge of the stage, scanning through the audience. "Good morning, Sister Deedee!"

A just-audible reply of _Good morning, Pastor_ from a head of gray curls.

"I love you," said Pastor Rick. Cheers and shouts of agreement. He walked on a few steps, stopped. "Good morning, Brother Alvin!"

"Good morning," said a bass-baritone.

"Brother Alvin," the pastor said very seriously, "I love you."

Everyone burst into laughter, followed by applause.

"Now, I want you to turn to your neighbor," said Pastor Rick, "and tell them you love them. Find at least three people! Let your brothers and sisters know how much you love them!"

"I love you," said the Air Force guy to Sam, pumping his hand.

"Uh," said Sam, trying not to squirm.

This went on for some time, and when Pastor Rick started leafing through papers on the lectern and cleared his throat, it was a relief. "Today's sermon is about friendship," he said as people fell silent again, "what it is, and how it plays into God's plan for our lives.

Pastor Rick leaned forward over the lectern. "You ever feel like there's not just something wrong, but like there's something, _somebody_ you're supposed to be?"

Sam felt like he'd been slapped.

"That's the gap between who you are right now and who God wants you to be." Pastor Rick bent down and picked up one of the a giant paper chains on the stage floor. "Now, the link across that gap is the people in your life." The paper chain rustled when he shook it. "See, the right people in your life will push you toward your purpose, but the wrong people are gonna do the opposite. As a matter of fact, I'd say many of you here this morning, you want to pray more! You want to give more! You want to do more for the glory of God! You want to have a passionate pursuit of Jesus Christ, but the environment around you, the people around you, are hindering that."

He paused to take a drink of water, and Sam snuck a look at the people around him. If anyone else felt the intense discomfort, bordering on embarrassment, that Sam did from the phrase _passionate pursuit of Jesus Christ,_ none of them showed it.

Pastor Rick set his glass down with a definitive clack and picked up the chain again. "The people in your life, they talk ways you don't agree with, but because you're a product of your environment, you find yourself saying things you don't even want to say." He tore a brown link. "Some of you want to be sexually pure, but the people around you don't have your same conviction, to there's all these temptations to be impure." He tore a pink link; Sam resisted the desire to curl into the wall. "You want to have peace in your mind and patience in your actions, but the people around you keep tearing others down—so you do the same." Pastor Rick held up the chain by one finger through a circle of red. "They keep stirring division, _us versus them,_ and they keep dragging you into it, and they keep growing the anger that's inside of you."

He tore the link.

Sam wanted out of here. Nine other people's knees blocked his exit from the row, several of them with canes or walkers. He thought about crawling under his chair to get to the door, but the wire book rack on the bottom of it sat too low.

When he glanced back at the stage, Pastor Rick was looking right at him.

Except in the next instant the pastor's gaze moved on, over the assembly sitting rapt, and Sam could no longer be sure the contact had ever really happened. "So here is our key verse today, Proverbs 13:20: 'Whoever walks with the wise, becomes wise, but the companion of fools will suffer harm.' He tapped the Bible he held on the cover. "That is God right there telling us to pick our friends carefully. But how do we do that?"

Pastor Rick came out from behind the lectern, paging through the Bible that he held. He stepped over the paper chain that lay in several pieces on the floor as he went. "Fortunately, God's given us a story that shows us exactly what true, authentic friendship is, and that's David and Jonathan," he said. "1 Samuel 18:1: 'As soon as he had finished speaking to Saul, the soul of Jonathan was knit to the _soul_ of David.'"

Pastor Rick put the Bible down and shut his eyes, breathing visibly. "Those are such powerful words! The _soul!_ And verse three tells us this: 'Then Jonathan made a covenant with him, because he loved him as his own soul.'

He opened his eyes again. "You gotta understand something," he said into dead silence. "Jonathan? His dad, Saul, was the king. But Jonathan went against his own dad, and he made a covenant with David! _He stripped off his own robe,_ the robe that was the symbol of his authority, of his royalty, and he gave it to David." He shook his head, laughing a little. "Do you see what that is? That is selfless love. We don't have that in our society anymore. Everybody, say 'selfless.'"

The sudden command startled Sam; he wasn't ready for it when the whole room echoed, _Selfless._

"You may feel alone sometimes," the pastor said. "You _will_ feel alone. Because that is what sin does to us: it isolates us. It keeps us distant from God and it keeps us distant from others. And it may feel hopeless sometimes, like we can never be clean, but friends: God is just waiting for us."

The band started playing a very quiet beat. "As we approach our invitation here in a moment," said Pastor Rick, "I ask you to consider: are you feeling alone even when you're with the people in your life? Are you surrounding yourself with the people who are gonna push you toward your purpose?"

He bent and picked up the paper chain one last time. "You need them, brothers and sisters. You need them right now, because you're cracking, and you're separating…" Slowly he tore through a thick, green link. "…and if you're not careful, the link you need most is gonna be broken."

He let the pieces fall to the floor.

Silence. Sniffles.

"Show me your friends," said the pastor, "and I'll show you who you're becoming."

Pastor Rick freed his microphone from its stand and approached the congregation. "At this time I'd like to invite all those in need to come up to the front. All those who need to say, 'I'm sorry, Jesus, for letting corruption into my life'; all those who need to grab somebody they love and come up to this altar and pray with them: 'God, we've slipped, we've fallen right into the muck and we're drowning.' All those who need to repair that chain connecting them to their faith and to their loved ones, who need that chain to be their lifeline, come on down."

The drummer started high-hatting, the guitarist started strumming, and people all over the room stood up. Some put their hands in the air, swaying like trees; others shuffled out of their rows and into the aisles, moving slowly toward the foot of the stage. Without a word, the talcum powdered Air Force wife pulled Sam to his feet and along beside her.

Sam's uppermost feeling was of awkwardness. He had no idea where he was going or what he was supposed to do when he got there. All he could think, reflecting on David and Jonathan, was that this book and all the stories in it meant something to these people that it just didn't to him, that he was standing outside something he would never understand. In place of the frank and profound emotion he could see on the faces around him, he knew only discomfort, anxiety, and yearning to feel what they felt. It would have to be better than this.

Bodies hemmed him in, young, aged, perfumed, sweating, neutral. Some were shorter than he was, many much taller, almost all broader. The Air Force lady had disappeared somewhere, but Sam was being herded inexorably toward the stage all the same. Sometimes he could glimpse Pastor Rick through the throng, where he had his microphone in one hand and the other stretched out over people's heads as he murmured, "Come to the Lord."

"He'll never let you down!" someone cried.

Others took it up: _He'll never let you down! He'll never let you down!_

It was stifling with so many bodies pressed so close together, and the stage lights beat down from above. Sam found himself only a layer distant from the edge of the stage. People were strewn all over the steps on either side: women curled up in dresses, men on their knees with their faces in their hands, many of both with their shoulders shaking. Kids were there too, hands up in surrender and faces wet. Someone close by keened, and Sam felt a familiar, hated sympathetic prickle at the corners of his eyes.

Pastor Rick paced up and down the edge of the stage, touching bowed heads as he went, saying, "Come to the Lord. The Father's arms are open. They're always open. In Jesus' name, amen."

Someone wailed. Several someones moaned.

Sam had always been a sympathetic crier. He'd found it out, humiliatingly, at field day in first grade when some kindergarten girl had accidentally let go of a helium balloon she'd won and had collapsed sobbing right there, pulling Sam down with her until a teacher had stood speechless over both of them. Now he was surrounded by people weeping, some loudly, most gently, and he felt that awful tug like he was six again, and the swell of panic at the impending loss of control.

"If you've been cut off from the people in your life, come on up. If you have hurt the ones you love, come on up. If you've been selfish, if you've been blind, if you need a light to show you the way out of the maze of your own heart, don't despair. Don't give up. Just accept the grace He offers you. 'Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be whiter than snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall be as wool.'"

Sam fought the lump in his throat so hard it hurt.

"Don't you know how much He loves you? He loves with a love no force of evil can withstand. He loves with a love that fights. Does he have ninety-nine sheep safe with him, but you are lost? Well, sit tight, because he's coming after you!"

There was no air in here. Something fat or bony or male or female or young or old was squeezed up against Sam on every side, and the whole mass was connected by the hands everyone had on everyone else. They were swaying. Sam was swaying, too, because he was pressed in too tight to do anything else.

"He's coming after you to save you, and nothing will stand in His way. There's no mountain He won't climb, no thicket he won't pierce, no shadow he won't light up to find you. You can run from Him like Jonah; He will cross any ocean. You can defile yourself like David; He will wash any stain. You can hide from him like Adam and Eve; He will call out to you, He will still call out to you, and there is no wall or lie He won't tear down to find you, because you're His."

Air hit Sam's face and something solid hit his midriff: the edge of the stage. He sucked in lungfuls of oxygen as suddenly his vision cleared in a way it had not for what felt like hours. The corners of the room resolved; the blur of the colored lights shining from the ceiling became distinct beams; and he registered hands on his back and on either of his shoulders.

He turned to the person on his left to see Holly's freckled profile. Her eyes were puffy and red, and her face was turned up to the roof, and her mouth was moving although Sam couldn't make out the syllables. Next to her, clinging onto her shoulder like she clung onto Sam's, was Tyler. He looked pale and distraught, but when he met Sam's eyes he cracked a smile that was happy and sad at once. Something swelled up in Sam's chest that matched that smile.

Sam turned to the person on his right. In the same moment, they turned to him. It was Nathaniel.

They stared at each other in shock. Tears were running down both their faces, and for a moment Sam thought the shock was exposure, but in the next instant he realized what it actually was: recognition.

They exchanged tentative, watery smiles.

"Friends!" Pastor Rick shouted. "Let us praise Him!" And the band started up for real.

Sam didn't care for the music. It was nothing like the hymns sung in Blue Earth; it seemed like it was trying to be rock 'n' roll, but it wasn't much like what his father listened to either, more sing-y, more countrified, foreign in a way that reminded Sam of his own foreignness. He didn't know the tune, he didn't know the beat, he didn't know the words. But none of that mattered much, because the programs the sour-faced girl had set out before the service had lyrics on them, and when Tyler got hold of one, Sam leaned in beside Holly and Nathaniel and they all made room for him.

The others were swaying to the beat; copying them felt strange at first, but no one else noticed and soon Sam forgot to feel awkward. He couldn't sing, but no one was telling him to shut up. He couldn't dance, but no one was laughing. He didn't know any of the songs, but no one cared. They sang "All Who Are Thirsty" and "Lord, Prepare Me to Be a Sanctuary" and one called "More than Oxygen, I Need Your Love." Beyond his and the others' outstretched hands, Sam watched the crazy-colored lights dance on the ceiling.

Pastor Jim had talked about God's love in the handful of Sunday sermons Sam had seen, to be sure, and he'd talked about it when Sam had asked him questions; but he'd made it sound like something mysterious, abstract, distant. Nothing felt distant right now.

Then it was over.

People were applauding; the singers onstage bowed and retired somewhere, the throng at the bottom of the stage started to disintegrate, and Sam felt a sudden, frantic sense of privation even as the relief of no longer choking on body odor rolled over him. Where before he'd felt too hot, now he felt too cold. He startled at a touch on his head: Pastor Rick was leaning down from the stage, smiling, nodding for him to follow someone.

The someone was Tyler. He grinned his gap-toothed smile at Sam and led him excitedly over to the section of seating farthest from where Sam had started out. In the front, arms crossed over her front and staring into space, that foul-tempered girl Kristina sat wedged between the woman Pastor Rick had talked to in the parking lot on Saturday and a girl who looked like a much younger version of herself, but Sam had barely enough time to register the family resemblance before they arrived at a knot of people: Jordan, Eric, Daniel, Nathaniel, and several pairs of adults standing over them benignly. Everyone looked flushed and happy. Even the stone-faced Daniel was smiling. Even _Nathaniel_ was smiling.

"You must be Sam, Tyler's told me so much about you," said a man who bent to shake Sam's hand.

"This is my mom and dad!" said Tyler, removing all ambiguity.

"It's so good to see you here, Sam!" said Tyler's mom.

"Thanks, Mrs. Eddy."

"Is this your first time here?" asked a woman with Jordan's florid complexion. They were all making their way up the aisle, to where the sanctuary doors had been thrown open. Sunlight flooded in from the lobby, dazzling after ninety minutes in dimness.

"Yeah," said Sam, suddenly shy.

"Well, welcome!"

At the door, a teenager who looked like an older version of Daniel—big, dark-haired, solid—was handing out leaflets, smiling as he talked with people who clearly all knew him. "My brother's on the Serve Team," said Daniel proudly.

It gave Sam a bit of a jolt. He remembered the fragment of conversation he'd caught— _my brother Mark works with him, says he's trouble_ —and how he'd stood at Nathaniel's side while Nathaniel accused him of coming from a godless household. He'd been so sure at the time that they were talking about Dean, and the certainty had drawn a mental picture of Mark—impassive like Daniel, vaguely menacing—that this guy didn't match at all.

He was indeed Mark. He had a stick-on name tag that said so. He smiled at Sam as they approached. "Hiya. Do you want to accept Christ in your life today?"

"I—" Sam felt the eyes of friends and parents on him. He remembered the longing that had gone through him in front of the stage, and the almost crushing sense of belonging. "Yes," he said in a rush. "Yes, I do."

Mark handed Sam a leaflet. "That's great; a spiritual counselor will come an' talk to you. Heya, Danny," he said, messing his little brother's hair.

And that seemed to be it. Sam found himself waiting in line for cookies with the others while the grown-ups herd-migrated toward an urn of coffee.

"That was fun!" Sam said.

"It's always fun here," Tyler said proudly. "We're no dead church."

"What's a dead church?"

"It's one where the Holy Spirit isn't in the worship," said Jordan, stacking jam thumbprints in a napkin. "Where everybody just sits in pews and listens to the organ and stuff."

That kind of sounded like Pastor Jim's church, which Sam had always found soothing; there was space to think in it. "Wow," he said out loud.

"Yeah, it's dumb. But there's lots of fake Christians like that."

They ate their cookies. Jordan apparently had a new BB gun. Eric told a story about a crippled guy he'd seen in Bethel. Only Nathaniel was quiet. When not preaching, it struck Sam, he usually was.

While the others were debating whether Jordan's cousin had or had not killed a water moccasin six feet long, Sam worked up his courage and said, "I'm sorry about your dad."

Nathaniel, who'd been snort-laughing along as he followed the conversation without participating in it, paused in taking a bite out of a cookie. He chewed and swallowed before he said, "Thanks." He wouldn't meet Sam's eyes.

Suddenly Sam wanted very badly to be friends with this kid. "I— Me, too. My mom, when I was a baby. She died in a house fire."

Nathaniel did look up at that, startled.

Sam forced a smile and shrugged. "Anyway. I'm really sorry."

Tentatively, Nathaniel smiled back.

"Sam!" Pastor Rick swept up, beaming. Sweat still sparkled in his close-cropped hair, though his hand was firm and dry when he pumped Sam's. "Mark tells me you're ready to accept Christ today."

"Yeah," said Sam, buoyed on a swell of—pride? Belonging? Pride in belonging?

"That's great news. You have a few minutes to talk?"

"Yeah!" Butterflies crowded his stomach. He was already thinking ahead to the baptism: would it be in the lake? Did he want it to be in the lake? He turned to the others while Pastor Rick started toward the sanctuary doors. "I'll see you Wednesday!"

Silence fell. Tyler drew up short; Jordan looked between Daniel and Nathaniel.

"Wednesday's Daniel's birthday party," said Eric. Daniel nodded. "There won't be any boys' group 'cuz most of us are going."

"Oh," said Sam. The others looked at him, Tyler biting his lip like he wanted to say something, but an invitation conspicuously was not extended. "Oh, okay. Till Saturday, then."

Tyler nodded eagerly, the others somberly. Except Nathaniel. Nathaniel just watched him, a faint frown on his face.

Pastor Rick pressed the hand of the woman he'd been talking to on the sanctuary threshold and smiled as Sam joined him. "Ready? Let's just step through so we can have a quiet place to talk."

Once again Sam found himself in the dim back row; more people in the red _SERVE TEAM_ t-shirts were striking equipment and props on the stage. Someone had shut off the purple light behind the crosses.

"So, Sam," said Pastor Rick when they were seated, "you said you want to accept Jesus into your heart and your life today. That's great! I'm going to ask you some questions about your spiritual life, and all you need to do is answer them as honestly as you can. It's not a school test. All right?"

"Sure," said Sam, even though his stomach fluttered.

"What was it that made you respond to the message this morning?"

Sam surprised himself with how suddenly and intensely he did not want to answer the question. He'd already spilled his guts to this man, told him everything, told this near-stranger his worst and most closely guarded fear. Now the guy he'd confessed it to was acting like the conversation had never happened. "The songs," Sam temporized.

Pastor Rick paused. "The songs."

Sam swallowed. All vestiges of his earlier euphoria disappeared at the tone of the pastor's voice. "Yeah. I guess I liked the words."

Pastor Rick nodded. He didn't look mad, but he looked serious and he was no longer smiling. "Sam, how would you describe your relationship with Jesus?"

Sam had expected this to be about God, not Jesus. Questions like _Do you want to accept Christ in your life today?_ and _Have you made a decision to follow Jesus in your life?_ on the Newcomer's Survey he'd found under his chair had been, he had to admit, pretty strong foreshadowing that Jesus would be involved, but it still felt and sounded weird in a way that simple _God_ did not.

He thought about what he could recall of the gospels. "He stood up for people," he said. "People no one else would stand up for. I like that."

Pastor Rick's serious look deepened. "That's good, Sam, but what about your relationship with Him? Do you feel like He is a presence in your life?"

"Yeah!"

"How?"

Sam's mouth dried up along with his words.

Pastor Rick gave him a sad smile. "Here's what I think, Sam: you've taken some important steps today, but you're not ready to take _the_ step."

"No, no, please! I can do it!"

Pastor Rick clapped him on the shoulder and stood. "I don't doubt that you can, but you need to do it prayerfully. I'm going to give you some homework."

Sam seized on this slender thread. "I'm good at homework."

That earned him a smile. "I believe it. Do you have a Bible at home?"

"No," said Sam, painfully aware of how this exposed him.

"Not to worry, we've got plenty. Here's what I want you to do. I'd like you to read the Bible and try to answer some questions for yourself: Who is God? Not what, Sam, who. Who is He? And then I want you to think about that person and what kind of friendship you want to have with Him." The pastor stood. "I'm gonna give you a list of books and chapters I suggest you look at. The Old Testament shows God more as an unknowable Father, but we as Christians seek a more personal relationship with Him. We believe He invites us to it. I hope you'll accept that invitation, but you shouldn't do it lightly."

* * *

"I'm gonna meet a friend," Sam heard Dean tell his father out in the living room on Tuesday night. "Is that okay?"

Sam, who both had to listen to his brother dream and do the laundry that resulted, would've known precisely what kind of friend was meant even if Dean hadn't bragged about it. Through the thin pre-fab, Dad made noises about responsibilities in the morning and Dean made noises about meeting them. Sam snorted and turned another page.

_And because of your knowledge shall the weak brother perish, for whom Christ died? But when you thus sin against the brethren, and wound their weak conscience, you sin against Christ._

Sam liked homework. At least, he liked having it, if not always doing it; homework gave a map to the hours, and maps were another thing Sam liked. When there was no other reading material in the car, there was guaranteed to be a map. When dad was speeding, white-knuckled and bloody, and wouldn't say why, maps were the thread that guided them back to the warm light of motels; when a glance told them they'd seen all a town had to offer thirty times over without ever having set foot in the place, maps were vistas of infinite possibility; when they were on hour five of strip malls on the I-90, they could trace highways and rivers and train tracks and see landscapes in their mind's eye that were always subtly but infinitely better than the America on the other side of the glass that stood, for most of their lives, between them and it.

He and Dean used to play a version of hide and seek that worked in the car, courtesy of a road atlas. _Are you east or west of the Mississippi? East. Are you near a national forest? No. Are you near water? Damn it—yes. Are you in Detroit? You cheated. Did not. You so did. Did not, you just suck at this._

Pastor Rick had told Sam to find out who God was. He'd even told him where to start looking: in the gospels, and in 1 Corinthians, and in Romans. Sam had read these. Well, he'd mostly read them. He kept trying to read them.

_Knowledge puffs up, but love edifies. And if anyone thinks that he knows anything, he knows nothing yet as he ought to know._

1 Corinthians 8: Pastor Rick's special recommendation. Though the context was quite specific, the passage made Sam uncomfortable. For too much of his life, knowledge had been the difference between survival and extinction, with varying degrees of literalness. Finding the truth had been the mission defining his family since the night his mother had burned; and although he had begun to feel, somewhere along the way, that whatever truth he was looking for wasn't exactly the same as the one his father and brother were, the drive itself was no less his than theirs. He could say that for himself. In that sense, at least, he was a Winchester.

But if believing in this was the price of baptism, and baptism could make him feel the way the woman in the lake had looked—if it could wash all these other feelings out—then he could do it.

He could. It was just, there was a lot of this, and when he'd been assigning Sam all this reading Pastor Rick had assured him that most of it would be from the New Testament like he thought that was going to be easier for a kid to read, but—

Sam thumbed the couple inches of the Old Testament.

He'd never read the whole thing, but he knew parts. The Book of Jonah was only, like, three pages; the Book of Isaiah was long but full of really amazing ways to wish death on an enemy; he liked a lot of the Psalms; nobody who knew it existed didn't read the Song of Solomon, even if some parts were more confusing than anything else. Nor the Book of Job, of course. Everyone thought of Job when they thought of the Old Testament.

Genesis he'd never gotten all the way through. He'd always try and then hit the parts with endless lists of _begat_ s, which he'd stare at for as long as he could stand, trying to understand what about them was poetic or significant, or what life-altering wisdom anyone could possibly glean from _When Mahalalel had lived sixty-five years, he became the father of Jared,_ because millions of people believed that every word of this came straight from God so there had to be something in it. But he'd never had much success.

What had Pastor Rick said about original sin? That disobedience was a symptom, not the disease?

_Who is God? What kind of friendship do you want to have with Him?_

Sam flipped to the beginning of the Bible and leafed forward.

_"You will certainly not die," the serpent said to the woman. "For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."_

_She took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized that they were naked._

_To the woman God said, "I will make your pains in childbearing very severe." To Adam he said, "Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil will you eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are, and to dust you will return."_

_And the LORD God said, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever."_

Sam wound the marker ribbon around and around his finger and stared at the page. Was this how he wanted to know and be known by a friend?

After a minute he closed the Bible, shoved it between the mattress and the wall, and went out to do something about his growling stomach. Dean was long gone, of course; no background noise from the TV to leaven the quiet.

Sam was only a couple bites into bologna, American cheese, and mustard (no lettuce or tomato around) when his father came into the kitchen. The man stood there blinking for a moment, and Sam couldn't tell whether it was surprise at the sight of a son or of the outside world generally. Dad took a stool and watched Sam eating. Uh-oh. Was Sam supposed to have made dinner tonight? It hadn't been on his chores list. Should he have known to do it anyway? No, screw it; Dad would tell him if he wanted Sam to make him something.

"You can walk to the youth group tomorrow," Dad said after a while. "I probably won't be back in time, and Dean might not, either."

Sam's mood, which had only been flagging more the longer he tried to find the ecstasy he'd felt in the church in himself or the Bible again, flipped over on its back and let its limbs shrivel up. "They're not having it tomorrow."

"Oh. Well, if you want to go out, you can, but you have to leave the place and a phone number with Melton."

His father had already told him this, the day he'd ungrounded him. John Winchester did not, as a rule, say things twice. "I remember," Sam said.

Dad's gaze still rested on Sam's underwhelming sandwich, though he didn't appear to be seeing it. "Dean's out with friends," he said, as if in explanation for his own presence.

"He has a girlfriend," Sam said sourly.

"What, really?"

Once, Sam would have felt smug at knowing something about Dean his father didn't, but this fact would have been too obvious and banal for that even if Dean hadn't told him himself. If anything, it just made him feel stupid for every time he'd congratulating himself for knowing something about his brother he'd thought was a secret. Probably there hadn't been anything special about those occasions, either. Dumb to think there had been, just like it had been dumb to think he was really friends with Tyler and the others.

* * *

When Sam opened his eyes the following morning, it was to Dean's slack jaw about three feet distant, as that was the width of the aisle between their beds. Drool made a dark patch on Dean's pillow. His hair was pancake-flat at the back like it got when he slept on it wet, and Sam had a foggy memory of the shower running in the middle of the night and Dean coming in wearing a towel.

Their father's voice filtered through the wall. Sam didn't really want to be awake, but he could already tell he wasn't getting back to sleep; anyway, the clock said reveille was only seven minutes off. He stumbled to the bathroom, washed his face, wiped the yellow stuff off the faucet on autopilot, and went into the living room feeling gray inside and out.

Dad was still on the phone. His voice was pissed, but his expression was resigned. "—Don't try to tell me he broke the damn thing; maybe I raised an idiot, but I didn't raise one who doesn't know how to handle tools." A pause. "That's what I thought." Another pause. "You're damn right I did, and did Melton ever tell you anything about the size of the favor we're talking about? Two and a half." Dad glanced up and saw Sam there, but didn't react. "Fine. I'll leave it with Melton for you. Thank you for giving it to me straight, Coleson. Oh, I'll put the fear of God in him, all right. Yes. Thank you kindly. Have a good one." He hung up.

"What's going on?"

Dad rubbed a hand over his beard, sighed, and turned away from the phone. "Your brother is unemployed," he said wryly.

There was a tension in him that seemed more like a distraction from what he'd been on the phone about than caused by it, so although that news made Sam blink, he didn't ask for details.

"I have to get on the road," Dad said, collecting his jacket and keys. "I'll be back later."

Sam ate cereal while he watched the dawn solidify out living room window, much like he had any other morning here. Dean slept on like the dead. Or, at least, no sign of life emitted from the bedroom. Whatever Dad was doing, he'd been in too much of a hurry to leave a chores list and it wasn't a laundry day, so Sam just did the basic cleaning, more to fill the time than anything else.

By nine o'clock, Dean still hadn't made an appearance. Sam flipped on cartoons with the volume on low and half-watched them, thinking of going out to the lake, wanting to just go anywhere but without the heart to actually do it.

Five minutes after ten in the morning, a pickup truck rolled into view in the living room window and stopped there. Daniel's mom was behind the wheel. Daniel, Tyler, Jordan, Eric, and Nathaniel were in the back of it.

Sam scrambled out the door. Daniel grinned at him. "Do you want to come to my birthday party?"

"Can I?"

"Yeah! We'll give you a ride."

"I'll be right there." Sam's leaden feeling was gone like it had never been. "I just have to leave my folks a note."

A minute later, Eric and Jordan were lowering the tailgate and giving Sam a hand up. "Thanks for inviting me," he said breathlessly as the truck began to move.

Jordan smiled at him. Eric smiled at him. Daniel smiled at him. Nathaniel smiled at him, freckles crinkling at the corners of his eyes. Tyler did not.

They turned right onto NC-41 and everybody in the back of the truck whooped as Daniel's mom stepped on the gas. Nathaniel in particular seemed in high spirits, his grin blinding, rat tail whipping in the wind. Not much was more fun than riding in the back of a pickup truck at highway speeds; they could barely hear each other, but it didn't stop them shouting back and forth, and Sam was right back in that giddy, embracing feeling he'd had in the church on Sunday.

"We're gonna shoot BB guns," Jordan called over the wind. "You wanna learn how?"

Sam laughed. "BB guns? I can hit a roofing nail with a .45!"

Everybody seemed to think that was hilarious, but in a friendly way, and Sam thought of the moment he could prove himself the best marksman of them all, how cool they'd think him, how much more they'd accept him.

Only Tyler seemed immune to the contagious good mood. He sat in the corner of the truck bed between the cab and the wheel well and only spoke when spoken to. Reflexively, Sam was a little miffed—weren't they friends? Wasn't Tyler happy to see him?—but shelved it until he could find out what was wrong. He scooted over to be next to Tyler. "What's the matter?"

Tyler pressed his lips together in a line and looked away. "Nothing."

Sam lingered at Tyler's side, watching him, hesitating, but Tyler still refused to look at him. The annoyance he'd deferred returned as the conviction grew: Tyler didn't want him here; he didn't want to share his friends. He didn't want Sam to be one of them, not really.

Fine. Sam had better things to do, like help plan their Capture the Flag strategy.

The truck turned in at a drive and Daniel's mom hopped out to open the gate. Then they continued, tunneling slowly into the trees and undergrowth. The forest that darkened this end of the lake was completely different from the pine plantation where Dad had taken him. Here the space between trees was crowded with brambles—some with truly impressive thorns—and the air was thicker, unmoving. They all slapped at bugs as they bounced down the private road.

Daniel's house turned out to be a low-slung structure suspended a few feet off the ground on brick pilings; a dog greeted their arrival by barking ferociously, straining at the end of its chain tether in a corner of the small lawn and snapping. Balloons were tied to the ends of the stair railings leading up to the big screen porch, and on a grill next to the driveway, Daniel's dad was turning out hamburgers and hot dogs for a sizable crowd of kids and moms.

"Where's Mark?" Sam asked, mainly to prove he remembered his host's brother's name.

"Had to work," Daniel said laconically.

"Oh."

Maybe he was offended that Sam had asked, upset because his big brother couldn't come to his birthday party. That was probably it.

They ate lunch. A cake was brought. Sam was embarrassed when he realized he didn't have a present to add to the pile he glimpsed inside through the screen door, but no one else seemed to care, so he tried to put it out of his mind. A wooden plaque hung on the wall of the porch, and while he waited to be served, Sam read the inscription burned into it: _Walk by faith, not by sight. —2 Corinthians 5:7._ Then Daniel's mom smiled at him and offered him a corner piece with a frosting rose.

It turned out a lot of the other kids here were Daniel's little sisters' friends rather than his, which explained why most of them were female, so the original group of boys soon splintered off: Sam, Daniel, Eric, Jordan, Tyler, and Nathaniel. Daniel's parents said that shooting had to wait until the youngest kids had vacated the property, so Daniel said he'd show them all the creek.

The woods swallowed up the sound of the party behind them. The creek was about fifteen feet wide and carved out a ravine as deep as they were tall, but the stream at the bottom was shallow and slow. It ran over white sand, blinding white, same as everywhere around here, and the water was shockingly red. Sam supposed it had to be from all the pine needles.

They crossed the creek on the back of a giant tree downed by the recent storm and followed it all the way to where it fed the lake. Sam could make out the open-air chapel directly opposite. It was hard to believe this was the same lake he'd swum in; the water was rust-red against the shoreline, and at the mouth of the creek, concentrated tannins spooled out in long, visible ribbons that tugged at something in the back of Sam's mind. He turned away with a shudder.

The shore on this side was crowded right up to the waterline with scrubby laurel and briars with thorns the size of shark teeth, so after a few minutes of throwing bits of tree bark at a cypress stump a few yards out—Sam started off winning this brand of marksmanship, too, but soon caught on from Daniel's scowl that he'd be better off letting the birthday boy have the victory—they moved inland.

"There's a clearing," said Jordan.

"With a fire-ring," put in Daniel.

"It's a good place to hang out," said Eric.

Nathaniel led the way.

The mood changed somewhere between the lake and the clearing. Sam was walking along the lip of the creek, Jordan in front of him, Daniel behind him, Tyler straggling, when he felt the fine hairs on his arms lift.

He looked around: only forest. He listened: only squirrels, cicadas, and a jet ski on the lake. He kept quiet. At some point, the other boys had fallen silent, too.

They arrived at the clearing. Four logs of small diameter had been dragged around a small pit of black char. The logs were all storm-felled pines, with the twisting, wicked ends of their roots still protruding at one end: boys' work, not men's. They took their seats around the empty fire pit. Tyler met Sam's eyes across the circle. He looked sick.

Sam knew this feeling, but it didn't make any sense. He knew these instincts, the way other kids knew the sound of the school bus pulling away a minute too soon or a parent's key in the lock with a broken vase on the floor, but he didn't know how they could possibly have been activated here, now, at the perfectly normal birthday party of a friend.

"What's going on?" he asked.

"A test," said Nathaniel.

Sam turned to look at him. Nathaniel struck the butt of the stick he'd been fiddling with into a rock and leaned forward. "A test of faith. You said you wanna get saved."

"Yeah," Sam said guardedly.

"Well," said Nathaniel, and none of the other boys were speaking up, just looking at Sam with the same flat, impassive faces as had stared up at him on the roof the day he'd met them, "you heard what Pastor Rick said. About how you gotta have the right people in your life, if you really want to serve God."

"I heard it, yeah."

"Here's your chance to show God which side you're on. To show Him you're not like your family."

The dread building in the pit of Sam's stomach turned stone-solid. "What are you talking about?"

"Your brother's with Satan," said Daniel.

"What does Dean have to do with anything?"

"He insulted us," said Eric. "He insulted our church, and our pastor, and God."

Dean didn't even know Pastor Rick. "There's got to be some kind of misunderstanding," Sam said.

"You don't even know what he did, do you?" said Jordan. "He tore down the statue at the church. Put the head of a heathen on Christ our Lord."

"And he defiled the Pastor's daughter." Nathaniel said this with a perfectly straight face. "It can't stand."

"My brother works with your brother," said Daniel, "so he and the Crew, they made a plan. They're gonna go around and pick up Dean for work like everything's normal. He told me. Said they'll tell him Mr. Coleson ain't mad, 'cause he's never liked Pastor Rick, so he wants him to come back on the Crew."

"Dean won't fall for that," Sam said instantly.

Nathaniel had been looking right at him through the entire conversation. "You did."

Tyler wouldn't meet Sam's eye.

"Anyway," Daniel finished, "they're gonna take him to the hog farm and dip him in the manure pond."

Sam felt cold all over.

The boys had all burst out laughing and whooping, everyone except Tyler and Nathaniel: Tyler looking at the ground, Nathaniel smiling a quiet, triumphant smile. Sam jumped to his feet. "It isn't funny!"

"You're right. It's _hilarious!"_ Eric said.

"You're gonna stick up for him after what he did?" said Jordan. "Come on, it's perfect!"

"It's murder!"

This time their laughter was incredulous. "Don't be dumb."

"Listen to me," Sam said urgently. "We have to tell your parents, we have to call the police. The hog lagoon—it'll _kill_ Dean. Mark, too. Anybody else who's close enough. We have to stop them."

For half a second, Jordan, at least, hesitated at the starkness of Sam's fear. Then Nathaniel snorted. "No, it won't."

"That's retarded," Eric agreed with him. "Turds can't kill you."

"Yeah, don't be a retard," Jordan echoed with all the confidence he'd lacked a moment before. "Pastor Rick knows all about it, anyway."

Sam froze. "You're lying."

_I was a chemist. Did you know that?_

"Wait, does he really?" asked Eric.

"Pretty sure," said Daniel. "I mean, Mark didn't _say,_ but I think so."

"He's so cool," Jordan said devoutly.

"Yeah, he's no faggot preacher."

Tyler seemed uneasy, looking between Sam and the others, but he opened his mouth only to shut it again.

Sam made a break for it.

Daniel and Eric sprang up immediately, blocking his path upstream. Sam changed course and pelted toward the lake. Inland the creek's ravine was too deep to ford without the fallen tree, but the mouth of it was broad and flat: he could cross there and make for the house. Briars tore strips out of his legs.

He heard feet thudding on soil and then somebody tackled him from behind. One set of arms grabbed him, then another, then another, then another. It took four of the boys to hold him, but they did it.

Sam fought, but every time he got free of one hand another took hold. He managed to turn around enough to see that one of the kids who'd chased him, who was helping to keep him here, was Tyler.

"What is _wrong_ with you?" Sam shouted. "You're insane! You're not a church, you're a psycho redneck _cult!"_

Nathaniel stepped in front of him. Up to now, Sam hadn't realized that Nathaniel was the only one not holding him in place. "'It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles somebody,'" he said, hands behind his back the way he'd delivered his youth sermon. His tone was scandalized, but a hint of a smirk played at the corners of his eyes. "'But what comes out of the mouth, this defiles him.' Matthew 15:11. See, this just proves you didn't ever respect our beliefs. You're talking wickedness, Sam; what will God think?"

Sam gritted his teeth. "That bad words aren't as big a deal as murder?"

"'Whoever says, "You fool!" will be liable to hellfire,'" Nathaniel quoted. "That's His holy Word."

"Then He can go to Hell!" Sam yelled at the top of his voice. "What kind of God is he, anyway? He's a liar! Satan was right about the stupid apple to begin with!"

There was nothing fake about Nathaniel's shock this time. Someone behind Sam gasped, and one of the sets of hands disappeared as their owner physically recoiled. Sam would have taken the opening, but he was shocked, too.

White-faced, Nathaniel pointed a finger at Sam. "Cleanse him!"

Before Sam could ask what the hell that meant, Nathaniel shouted, "Cleanse him in the lake! C'mon!" and the boys were grappling him forward.

They weren't far from the shore. Sam's feet dragged over the sand and undergrowth as his captors pushed and pulled him. When they reached the water's edge, he abruptly stopped fighting and made himself dead weight, which took them enough by surprise that Tyler and Eric dropped him entirely and Jordan lost his grip halfway. Sam swung up from beneath and connected with Daniel's crotch.

A high-pitched shriek rang over the water. Jordan dropped him. Sam nearly landed face-first in sandy water but managed to flip over at the last moment, in time to see Jordan's face twist into hatred over him. "You faggot!"

Eric recovered first. He gripped Sam by the upper arm and tried to heave him up, but Sam pulled him down with him instead. They splashed full-length into the lake this time; Sam's clothes soaked through and clung. He ducked his head and surged up, driving his forehead into Eric's nose. Eric howled but didn't let go.

"Clean his mouth out!" Nathaniel shouted. "Clean it right out of his mouth!"

And then Sam was under the water.

One pair of hands on his head, two; another on his back; another on his arms. Some of the water went up Sam's nose and he gagged.

He broke the surface. He couldn't tell whether he'd accomplished it through his fighting or they'd hauled him up on purpose. "—in Jesus' name, Devil, no more! We break your power, Devil, in Jesus'—"

Down again.

Sam dug his sneakers into the sandy bottom of the lake. The water burned in the briar gashes. While someone's fingers in his hair shook his head like a rag in a basin, he coiled his legs under him, counted, and lunged forward with all the strength and purchase he had.

It was enough to pull his captors off balance. While the boys holding him stumbled in the water, Sam shot to his feet. Black spots danced in his vision. From somewhere off to his right, he heard a shout:

"Sam!"

Sam turned to see Dean crashing through the undergrowth along the bank. Fear and fury showed stark on his face. When he was only a couple yards away, Dean abandoned the shore and charged straight into the lake.

Daniel tried to block his path; Dean shoved him backwards and he went down with a splash. Eric tried to run in the water. Tyler let go of Sam and backed away as fast as he could. Over Dean's shoulder, Sam saw Nathaniel raise a rock over his head.

Footing wasn't good in the shallows. The water threw off everyone's balance and made their instincts moot. Sam launched himself at Nathaniel without uttering a sound, and they went down together half in the lake, half in the briars trailing into it. The rock _plunk_ ed into the water. Sam grabbed a fistful of thorns in one hand, the rat tail in the other, and scrubbed what he held into something soft.

Nathaniel screamed. Sam kept going.

He released him an instant later, taking two, three, four steps backward into the water. His heart pounded in his ears.

Without using his hands, Nathaniel got to his knees. Then he got to his feet. He took a step. A sound came out of him, something like, "Gug."

Tyler, Eric, and Jordan clutched each other as they watched Sam, white-faced. Nathaniel said "gug" again and walked into a tree. He held his hands at his sides, fingers spread, and he kept making the same guttural noise over and over again. He pivoted and walked into a different tree. Something spattered onto the leaves below his face.

Jordan got it together first. He caught hold of Nathaniel by one arm, followed quickly by Eric. The others waded shoreward as fast as they could. As soon as they got ground underneath them, they grabbed Nathaniel and bolted into the woods. The last Sam saw of them was Tyler's shirttail.

Dean stood in the water arm's length away, so pale his freckles stood out like paint. His eyes were very wide.

All Sam could think to ask him was, "How'd you get here?"

"Stole a jet ski," Dean said, wild-eyed.

Sam didn't look at his hands. "Dean—"

"We have to go, Sam," Dean said, voice low.

"But—"

Dean sloshed a step closer in the water. "It's time to _go."_

The jet ski was beached a hundred yards down the shore. Dean shoved it into the water, tried to start the engine, got a cough, cursed. It started on the third try. There were as yet no sounds of pursuit.

"Get the lead out, Sam."

Without really feeling himself do it, Sam climbed on. He had a jolt, then, a moment where he dropped back down into his body and felt his hands. He felt the stickiness on them. He'd been about to put them around Dean's middle; he gripped the cracking foam saddle seat instead. Dean gunned the motor, and they shot forward.

The lake was a bright mirror. Sam had never noticed that before: how perfectly it reflected the sky when there was no wind and there weren't boats about. Somehow it was vaster, bluer, deeper in the reflection, like the world on top of the ceiling or the America in the map. The front of his wet t-shirt seeped into the back of Dean's mostly dry one.

Melton's dock was populated; the stretch of shore between it and Camp Jewel was exposed. Dean pointed them at the chapel in the middle of the empty field.

He ran the jet ski aground right at the base of the thing, where at least it was hidden from the road. They mounted the wooden stairs that led from the lake to the chapel, passing over two patches of rot that looked for all the world like footprints.

Dean was ahead of Sam and didn't look back. "Dad called. He said—"

Sam stopped.

"—pack ASAP and wait—"

"Dean, we have to tell him."

In the scrap of privacy afforded by the sidewall of the pavilion, Dean wrung lakewater out of his jeans. "Tell him what?" he said tersely.

Sam didn't answer, but he didn't move, either. Dean tried to ignore him a few moments longer before he broke, dropping his jeans and striding over to grapple Sam up over the threshold and into the corner of the chapel.

"You have to tell him," Sam said again, stronger this time.

But Dean only skewered him with a look. It hit Sam, then, that Dean hadn't looked away once in the lake. "Tell him what?"

Sam swallowed. "I could tell him," he said, "if you won't."

Plywood hit his back, hard.

Sam looked down at Dean's fist in his shirtfront. The white was spotted with pink. He looked back up.

If they didn't tell Dad now, they couldn't tell Dad ever. They couldn't tell anybody. If they never told anybody, Sam was suddenly certain, this horrible, horrified feeling inside of him would just keep growing. He'd never get to be clean of it. Dean too: not in the same way, but it would cost him. They'd be cut off, and there'd be no going back. Dean was trying to look fierce, but he was so pale his freckles stood out like mud spatter.

Sam's heart pounded. The punctures in his palms throbbed with it. "You don't understand," he said.

Dean's face screwed up. "So _what?"_

Sam wanted to say, _So this is why I left,_ but even he wasn't sure exactly what he would have meant by it.

A rumble reached them, faint but unmistakable. Sam froze. Dean's eyes shot up to the gap between the sidewall and the roof, although it was too high to glimpse the road. They stood still as the engine drew closer; then Dean let go, stepped back, and stripped off his shirt, a familiar brass pendant bouncing free onto his breastbone.

He held the shirt out to Sam. "Okay?" he asked.

Sam looked from the shirt to the amulet. This would be theirs. It would be precarious and probably a horrible idea, but it would be theirs. "Okay."

He pulled the shirt on over his own. Dean's hands moved over his front, tugging and smoothing. There was no way it didn't look odd, too big and on top of something soaking wet, but it was dark enough that nothing but water showed through it. Dean held him at arm's length for inspection, still pale.

"You found me," Sam said irrelevantly.

"Yeah, and it was a bitch and a half, can we go now?"

The engine was getting louder. "You saw. Dean, you _saw."_

Dean looked at him, wide-eyed and shit-scared and doing this anyway. "Yeah, I did."

The engine cut out. A car door slammed.

Sam flung himself at Dean's chest and held on until the amulet cut into his cheek. One of Dean's arms wrapped around Sam's back; the hand of the other buried itself in his hair. His fingers clutched the back of Sam's head, where they tightened, dug in, and drew blood.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [About the setting and portrayal of evangelical Christianity](https://road-rhythm.tumblr.com/post/637598549535752192/hey-sorry-if-this-is-weird-but-i-really-enjoyed)


End file.
